Geography

Geography

Published 2002

To fulfill formal prayers and Pilgrimage duties, Muslims needed to find the direction and routes to al Ka’ba from virtually any spot on the globe. The Ka’ba, the house of Abraham in Mecca, is what Muslims face when they pray. This is known as “Qibla.” To find the Qibla from anywhere in the world, Muslims invented the compass and developed the sciences of geography and geometry.

Geography in Sicily

Abu Abdulla al-Idrisi (1000-1166) was born in Ceuta but received his education in Cordoba. After visiting Spain, North Africa, and Asia Minor, he settled in Sicily. He was the greatest geographer of the Middle Ages. For the King of Sicily, Roger II (1130-1154), he made a celestial globe and a silver, disk-shaped map showing seven zones of the world. The King commissioned him to write a geography of the world. This work is entitled Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fee Ikhtiraq al-Afaq(or Kitab al-Rujjar, a book of Roger). It was illustrated with 70 maps.  He did his work at Palermo; the aforementioned book shows his grasp of such fundamental facts as the sphericity of the Earth. This doctrine was crucial to the discovery of America.  A synopsis of the text with 71 maps was printed in Rome in 1592. Partial editions of the text appeared in Leyden, Rome, and Bonn.

Ibn Battutah (Batutah), b. 24 February 1304 in Tangier, d. 1368 in Fès, was an Arab traveler and merchant. From 1325 to 1353, he visited many countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, including the southern regions of present-day Ukraine. Ibn Battutah’s 14th-century masterpiece provided a detailed view of the ancient world’s geography.

This map of the world was made by the Muslim geographer Jihani in the 10th century of the Christian era. The names have been translated from Arabic. Many Muslim civilizations have been seafaring and relied heavily on maps. For that reason, Muslim societies also studied astronomy intensely and invented the modern naval sextant.