Episode 9: The Qiblah, Debunking flat earth and Islamic Geography

"And wherever you are, turn your faces towards Mecca for prayer”. This particular Quranic injunction will eventually lead to major events in the history of science: a complete overthrow of the Greek works on astronomy, the most precise map-making, and the calculation of the circumference of the Earth.

Keep in mind that the concept of a spherical Earth was a broadly accepted idea in the Muslim world, so these allegations that the Quran says the Earth is flat are completely ridiculous.

The need to calculate the Qibla arose in the early period of the Golden Age. Getting the coordinates for Mecca plus all the longitude and latitude coordinates of cities all over the Muslim world, correcting and adjusting them accordingly, creating a new cosine law, they got an equation like this one for the calculation of the Qibla. The Caliph Al-Ma'mun commissioned a team to calculate the distance within an arc, and finally, the calculation of the circumference of the whole Earth got something very close to the modern value, and his measurement was used by Christopher Columbus for his voyage to colonize America.

The bottom line is that if a few words from the Quran can lead to groundbreaking achievements in fields of geography and geodesy, what new disciplines of science lie hidden behind the entire text of the Quran? If they could usher in the Golden Age with just a few words, what revolution is in store if we view the entire Quran from their perspective?