Holy Kaaba’s Direction: Are we wrong?

Prayers are considered important for advancing one's personal or family or political welfare and less for Islam or all Muslims. Generally, many Muslims come to mosque to hurriedly offer prayers as a customary or routine matter and run away in a reckless speed, without caring for the effectiveness of their prayers. It seems many of them don’t even bother about the correctness or sacredness of their prayers. Many children are brought into the mosque as a matter of training, but in practice that serves only to make payers less serious. Political Muslims make mosques a forum to fight for their parties and posts and as a result, mosques and prayers have become a “usual” insignificant matter. The Ulemma do raise this issue time and again but, unfortunately, of very little impact.

From Hajj to daily prayers are becoming an affair without intended spirituality. Reports from Saudi Arabia say that some 200 mosques in Islam's holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way for prayers. This finding has alarmed the Islamic world about a possible lapse on their part to face the Kaaba’s direction while offering prayers by Muslims around the world. Muslims are being killed and tortured every where and Islam defamed, but Muslims still refuse to change, but they are interested in fining fault with other Muslims. That is sad.

A recent survey has revealed the crude aspect of ignorance of one of the key prayer codes. All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like sacred building in Mecca's Grand Mosque around which Muslims throng especially during the Hajj pilgrimage. But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.

The issue has perplexed many worshippers who are said to be anxious about the validity of their prayers. There have been suggestions that laser beams could be used to make an exact measurement. Tawfik al-Sudairy, Islamic affairs ministry deputy secretary, downplayed the problem in remarks quoted by the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat. "There are no major errors but corrections have been made for some old mosques, thanks to modern techniques," he said, "In any case, it does not affect the prayers."

Whatever maybe the actual position of the matter, it is of paramount importance for Muslims to face Kaaba during their prayers. It is quite likely that a few mosques built in olden days would not perhaps have been built to authentically keep the Kiblah or Direction towards the holy Kaaba. The mistake, clearly unintentional, which perhaps would not be a big sin by itself, needs to rectified forth with and Makkah leaders could intimate this thoroughness at the earliest around the world. Even under virtual siege form anti-Islamic nations and forces, the Muslims don’t seem to take the religion and its tents seriously but only are keen to find fault with Islam to appease the anti-Islamic media and arrogant forces seeking to end Islam.  Of course the enemies of Islam cannot succeed in spite of initial advances..

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Yours Sincerely,

DR. ABDUL RUFF Colachal

Columnist & Independent Researcher in World Affairs, The only Indian to have gone through entire India
South Asia.