From a recent discussion on Facebook’s AANR group:

Gagan Khan wrote:

Starting from the smallest to the biggest.

1) The infinitely small electrons revolve around the nucleus of the atom.

2) Muslims go round the Kaaba, which is at the geographic center of the Earth. At the time of Hajj, only black and white dressing is worn by all people.

3) The moon revolves around the earth

4) The earth revolves around the sun and billions of other planets and satellites revolving around their suns/stars.

5) Our Solar System is revolving around may be the center of the Universe or another super massive galaxy/Star

Just wondering if there is some kind of link?

Naturally, the good folk of AANR tore him a new one in moments for such a piss-poor apologetic, citing the faults in his understanding of particle physics, cosmology and (needless to say) basic logical inference. It’s hardly worth repeating their fisking here, though feel free to follow the thread itself if you’d like to see how it’s done. What I’m interested in here is the oft-repeated claim that the Kaaba is the “geographic centre of the Earth”. It seems to be bandied about quite a lot by Muslims, so let’s look at what they’re trying to say.

First off, it’s clear to anyone who isn’t a flat-earther (and that’s not as unpopular in Islam as you might expect) that Mecca can’t be at the centre of the Earth. Balmy as the Saudi summer is, it falls somewhat short of the 7,000°C temperature at the planet’s core. Muslim geographers, then, must be referring to Mecca as the centre of the Earth’s surface. But how can you pinpoint a centre for the surface of a sphere?

Well, as you might expect, I did some digging. Unsurprisingly, it appears that the main Muslim argument for Mecca being the centre of the Earth is, “it just is, alright? Now shut up, or there’s a jihad right here with your name on it, infidel.” Some Islamic apologists, though, have attempted a more “scientific” explanation…

The first of these relies on the idea that the Neil Armstrong and his team discovered that the Earth emits “special radiations” when they landed on the Moon in 1969. These “special radiations” turned out to emanate from – you’ve guessed it – the Kaaba, and Armstrong & co. published these results online for 21 days, before realising the dangerous truth of what they’d uncovered and deleting the document from the web. This proves that Mecca is the centre of the Earth, because of it’s “special radiation”.

Did you spot the mistake? Neil Armstrong found evidence for the Kaaba’s radiation in 1969, and published the information on the internet… in 1969. How many people were surfing the web in the late 60s? Not that many – ARPANET, the predecessor of the intertubes we know and love, only went online in ’69, and was probably not available to Muslim fundamentalists wishing to prove their point (seeing as how it was restricted to the US Defense Agency). Apart from Muslim apologists, no-one, including Neil Armstrong, seems to be aware of this suppressed document, so I think we can put this theory straight in the bin labeled, “Stuff they just made up.”

The second argument concerns the Earth’s magnetic field. Apparently, the Kaaba is a magnetic “equilibrium zone”, and this proves that it is positioned exactly halfway between the North and South poles. How it manages this feat in spite of being some 2000km north of the equator (which actually does demonstrate a degree of magnetic equilibrium) is beyond me. The “stuff they just made up” bin is looking pretty full…

These arguments are both the work of Dr. ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid of the Egyptian National Research Centre, who appears obsessed with making the world replace Greenwich Mean Time with “Mecca Mean Time”. Ever wondered why Egypt isn’t a leading scientific power? I imagine Dr Sayyid may have something to do with it… He did lead me, however, to an argument which at least makes a sort of sense; namely that Mecca’s distance from the North and South poles creates the Golden Ratio.

Maths time. Mecca is 7,632km from the North Pole, and 12,372km from the South. The ration of these two distances is 1.621 – sort of vaguely close to the Golden Ratio of 1.618… The ratio of the distance from the North Pole to the South Pole (20,004km) and from Mecca to the South Pole is 1.617, which is actually quite close to the Golden Mean, although again, it isn’t actually the right figure. By rounding both ratios to the number we want to arrive at (hey, it works for economists), it is established that Mecca, whilst not at any geographic “centre”, at least occupies a slightly interesting position on the map. Of course, this means that any other point along the same latitude is also the centre of the Earth, so the Sudanese town of Salala, Borj-Mokhtar in Algeria, Quang Ha in Vietnam and many other towns and cities are equally unique.

Whenever a religion tries to make scientific statements about the real world, it invariably results in an embarrassment for the religion concerned. Dr Sayyid joins Ken Ham, Kent Hovind and many more in being the drunken uncle dancing to ABBA at his religion’s wedding party.

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