The original English version of my paper “Faces of the Kaaba” presented below first saw the light some 40 years ago. It appeared in the popular magazine The Sciences, published by the New York Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 2001. References to the evidence for the claims made in that paper are to be found in the commentary “Astronomical alignments in medieval Islamic religious architecture”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 385 (1982): 303-312. The popular article has had four times as many readers on Academia as the commentary, and the former has been cited without reference to the longer study.
Ibn al-Wardi’s map of the sacred Muslim site of the Kaaba in Mecca. (Wikimedia Commons) – (Image rotated 90° left for banner purposes)
Mysterious lines an d rings of stones, scattered about the European countryside, are almost all that remains of the prehistoric people who assembled them – clearly with enormous effort– thousands of years ago. The best-known stone circle is, of course, Stonehenge, on England’s Salisbury Plain, but it is just one of more than 900 such circles known in the British Isles and across Europe. In many of these relics, key stones are aligned with the rising or setting of the sun, the moon, or certain prominent stars.
Astronomical alignments in general, and Stonehenge in particular, have a curious connection with the history of Muslim people over almost 1,500 years that have passed since the rise of Islam in the seventh century. The world of Islam has always centered on the holy city of Mecca, or, more precisely, on the Kaaba, the sacred sanctuary there. Wherever Muslims have settled they have faced the Kaaba in prayer, and all mosques are supposed to face that direction. But hundreds of medieval mosques, scattered from Iberia to Central Asia, are not properly aligned toward Mecca. Some face due south, whether Mecca lies in that direction or not; the Great Mosque of Cordova in Spain faces the Atlas Mountains rather than the deserts of Arabia; various mosques in Syria and Turkey face southwest rather than southeast; and some mosques in Central Asia face due west rather than southwest. Some early mosques in Iraq were pulled down within decades of their construction and rebuilt facing another direction. There are even historical religious complexes in Cairo with the inner and outer walls aligned in different directions.
Until recently, many scholars assumed that Muslims had simply been casual in laying out their mosques. Two researchers have even suggested (quite absurdly) that these mosques were erected to face somewhere other than Mecca. (See the note below on this error and the fallacies it spawned.) In the last few years, while searching through medieval Arabic manuscripts in libraries in the Near East and Europe, I have found treatises and diagrams that tell another story. The mosques were usually laid out with great care, but according to several schools of reckoning. In some cases, scientific methods were used to find the direction of Mecca; in other case, the tenets of a simple folk science were invoked; and on still other occasions, purely religious and legal guidelines were followed. These medieval Arabic manuscripts explain for the first time much that seems mysterious in Islamic architecture. They also hint at the original function of the Kaaba itself, and the ways it might have been used by pagan Arabs before it was adopted by the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, as a focal point for the Islamic faith. In its origins, it now appears, the Kaaba might even have had some features in common with the great stone circle on Salisbury Plain.
Islam had its genesis in the urban trading center of Mecca in the early seventh century. At that time, a proliferation of gods was worshipped at the Kaaba, some of them tribal and associated with sacred stones and trees, others astral and linked with the sun, the moon, Venus, or such prominent stars as Canopus. A carefully-regulated cult, with annual pilgrimage rites, had been practiced at the Kaaba for several generations before the time of Muhammad. Through the mists of Muslim legends and traditions, Western scholars have sought to piece together the actual story of the Kaaba’s origins. The sanctuary was first called simply al-bayt, ”the house”, and was a roofless enclosure with walls somewhat above the height of a man. In the early part of the seventh century, the walls were built up, probably in alternate layers of stone and wood, like the churches of Ethiopia, and the sanctuary came to be called “Kaaba” (literally, the cubic building) on account of its roughly cubic shape. The Kaaba held a number of sacred stones; the most famous, the Black Stone, still exists, embedded in one corner.
In the early days of the Muslim community, the faithful prayed toward Jerusalem, but Muhammad received a revelation to change the qibla, or direction of prayer, toward the Kaaba itself. The Koran, which is the written version of Muhammad’s revelation, contains a verse that has since influenced Muslim practice for close to fifteen hundred years: “Wherever you are, turn your faces toward the Sacred Mosque.”
Within a few decades of the advent of Islam, the decaying Sasanian Empire and most of the Byzantine Empire had fallen to Muslim armies, and a new empire was established that stretched from Spain to India. Mindful of the Koranic injunction to face the Kaaba in prayer, Muslims attempted to build each of their mosques with its prayer wall facing Mecca. A miḥrāb, or ornamental niche, fixed in the prayer wall symbolized the qibla, the sacred direction of Mecca and its sacred shrine. The notion of a sacred direction shaped not only the layout of Islamic architecture but influenced the life of the individual Muslim as well. Burial customs required that the corpse be laid out in relation to the qibla. And according to Islamic law, the faithful also were required to expectorate and relieve themselves in a direction perpendicular to the qibla.
The world’s leading mathematicians and astronomers from the eighth century to perhaps the fourteenth century were Muslims, and the determination of the qibla was one of their favorite problems. To find it, one needs to know the latitude and longitude of one’s own city, and of Mecca, and a formula to calculate the qibla from these coordinates. Muslim astronomers devised both geometric and trigonometric solutions to the problem. They compiled lists of localities and the direction to Mecca from each locality, and even developed universal solutions to the qibla problem: tables displaying the qibla for each degree of latitude and longitude, computed with remarkable accuracy. After the fourteenth century, qibla boxes, containing a magnetic compass and engraved with lists of localities and their qiblas, came into common use.
In short, within two centuries after the death of Muhammad, Muslim astronomers could compute the qibla for any locality in the Muslim world. As a result, many mosques were erected with their prayer walls facing Mecca ‘precisely’. But medieval Muslim scientists, following Hellenistic traditions of mathematical geography, were at odds intellectually with the tenets of Islam. And it seems that in the medieval Muslim world, few people listened to astronomers, least of all religious scholars, whose opinions tended to regulate popular practice. These scholars had their own ideas about qibla determination, and inevitably differences of opinion arose.
Religious scholars based their discussion of the qibla on the Koran, the practice and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and on the example of the generation of Muslims who built the first mosques. For instance, Muhammad had said when he was in Medina: “What is between the east and west is a qibla.” This prophetic saying, and its implication that the qibla is due south, was discussed frequently in later legal literature. But did he mean that one should always pray toward the south or was this statement valid only for Medina, which is north of Mecca, and for places north of Medina, such as Jerusalem and Damascus? The Prophet’s dictum was often taken to be universal, and many mosques from Spain to Central Asia were built – and still stand – facing due south, rather than Mecca.
There were also legal scholars who, while rejecting the qibla of the astronomers, took the Koranic injunction to face the Kaaba quite literally. Here, there were two main schools of thought. According to one opinion, one should stand so that one’s line of vision, when extended toward Mecca, would run along a side of the Kaaba. According to the second opinion, any qibla within some forty- five degrees on either side of this is legally acceptable.
The legal texts give but little information on precisely how one should stand “facing” a wall of the Kaaba. But instructions are contained in special treatises on the determination of the qibla by non-technical means. These treatises are part of an extensive corpus of texts relating to folk astronomy, a tradition of Arabian astronomical folklore that predates the advent of Islam and has very little relation to Islamic scientific astronomy, which was based on the earlier Greek, Indian, and Persian traditions. Folk astronomy concerned itself solely with what one could see in the sky, the points at which the sun, the moon, and the stars rose and set, but not with why they moved. The texts describe how the sun rises over the eastern horizon in different directions according to the season. In midsummer it rises north of east, and in midwinter it rises south of east. At the solstices (the astronomical term for midsummer and midwinter) its risings and settings define four directions. The moon follows similar paths across the sky but can swing a few degrees to either side of the path of the sun.
Islamic folk astronomy presents a sacred geography, in which the world is divided into
eight, or sometimes twelve, sectors, something like pie-shaped wedges, radiating from the Kaaba. In each sector are the key place names, provinces, and countries found there, and Muslims who lived in each sector were assigned a particular section of the Kaaba’s walls to face. To do so, the faithful were told to stand in precisely the same astronomical direction they would be facing if they were actually standing in front of that segment of the wall of the Kaaba itself.
Thus, for example, the communities in Iraq and Iran were instructed to face winter sunset, since someone standing outside the Kaaba facing its north-east wall is looking in the direction of winter sunset (that is, facing southwest). Of course, if someone far away from the northeast of the structure stood facing winter sunset too, that person would not necessarily be facing the Kaaba itself. Thus, these treatises present a simple, prescientific idea of direction.
The notion of the world divided into sectors about the Kaaba appeared for the first time in tenth-century treatises, and continued to be discussed until Ottoman times, that is, until the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Now that we know the texts, there are mosques all over the Muslim world that can be shown to have been laid out according to these popular, if often contradictory, notions of the qibla. Mosques in Spain, north-west Africa, and Egypt were built with their qibla walls directed southeast, toward winter sunrise, because, it was said, the corner of the Kaaba containing the Black Stone faced that direction. Near these mosques, others were built aligned toward the rising point of the star Canopus, so that, according to the texts, their qibla walls would face the north-west wall of the Kaaba.
But is the Kaaba in fact astronomically aligned, as medieval Muslims believed? After all, if one stands in Manhattan’s Washington Square, which for some of its regulars is the navel of the Earth, and asks any of them which way is north, most would point straight up Fifth Avenue. In fact, the entire street plan of Manhattan is skewed from the true north-south line, and the major axis of Washington Square points roughly toward winter sunrise. Should we therefore seek an association between New York University’s ‘Sunrise Semester’, held each winter and broadcast nationwide on television, and the alignment of Washington Square? Equally absurd associations have occasionally been adduced from the astronomical alignments of ancient and medieval sites, so we must proceed with extreme caution.
As it turns out, the medieval Arabic texts on folk astronomy were correct. The base of the Kaaba is actually roughly rectangular, rather than square, the ratio of its adjacent sides being about eight-to-seven. The shorter axis of the Kaaba is indeed roughly aligned with summer sunrise on one side and winter sunset on the other, and the longer axis points toward the rising of the star Canopus.
The medieval texts on folk astronomy also describe the four sides of the Kaaba as
facing the four winds. This is not as surprising as it might seem, since Arabian meteorology in pre-Islamic times defined the directions of the winds in terms of the risings and settings of the sun and various stars. Indeed, there were several pre-Islamic wind schemes, of which the one associating the winds with the four sides of the Kaaba is the most commonly cited in treatises on folk astronomy and in Arabic lexicographical works that discuss the names of winds.
The folk astronomy texts tell us that Arabs in preIslamic times favored the east wind, because it was thought to bring good fortune, and that the doors of their houses were open toward that direction. None of the houses of that early period exist today – they have vanished without a trace. But the Kaaba still stands, and its door is on the north-east side of the edifice, facing summer sunrise. The texts also say that Arabs favored the south wind because it brings rain. The most sacred corner of the Kaaba is the southeastern corner, in which is embedded the Black Stone, facing both the south wind and the east wind, directions defined by the rising of Canopus and summer sunrise. So the two winds and directions favored by pre-Islamic Arabs are recognizable in the layout of the sanctuary.
But did whoever first built the Kaaba really intend these alignments? Philological and etymological considerations suggest that they did. If one stands in front of the southwest side of the Kaaba, one is facing into the wind called the qabūl, and one is standing in the qibla. (The Arabic verb “to face” is istaqbala.) All three words are derived from the same root, q-b-l, having to do with facing.
I suspect that the original qibla, or direction of prayer, of the pagan Arabs was toward the rising sun. Muhammad prohibited his followers from praying at sunrise, in language that suggests his intent was to set his sect apart from others. If pagan Arabs had previously prayed at sunrise, it is reasonable to suppose that they would have faced the rising sun. In that position, the dabūr wind blows at one’s back, and the Arabic word for back is dabr, both words again from the same root. On one’s left (shimāl) hand, the north shamāl wind blows from al-Sha’m, Syria, the root of which has to do with misfortune. On one’s right (yamīn) hand, the south wind blows from al-Yaman, the Yemen, the root of which relates to good fortune.
It is possible that all these associations might have arisen after the original construction of the Kaaba. Conceivably, the orientation of the sanctuary was arbitrary, or was somehow influenced by local topography. But there is one more piece of evidence. A modern plan of the Kaaba, taken from a map of Mecca prepared from aerial photographs, reveals still another alignment. The major axis of the Kaaba is aligned to within two degrees of the rising of Canopus at about the first century C.E., but the minor axis is actually several degrees off the direction of summer sunrise. Rather, it is precisely aligned toward the southernmost setting position of the moon at the winter solstice, over the hills to the southwest of Mecca. This discovery was made a few years ago by Gerald Hawkins, best known for his work on the alignments of Stonehenge, which he conducted in the 1960s.
Roughly every nineteen years, the crescent moon sets at the spot on the horizon visible along the southeast side of the Kaaba. This lunar alignment is also found in many megalithic sites in Europe. There is no mention of this specific lunar alignment in the medieval Islamic texts on folk astronomy. Is it significant, or merely fortuitous? The pagan Arabs observed a lunisolar calendar – a lunar calendar adjusted to keep it in line with the solar year. Since twelve lunar months fall short of a solar year by about eleven days, every few years it is necessary to intercalate, or insert an extra month to stop the lunar months, with all their religious associations, from wandering through the seasons. (The Jewish calendar is, to this day, based on such a coordination of the lunar and solar cycles.)
This lunar alignment of the Kaaba may well have been intentional. The Koran states that God made the Kaaba a structure “for men and for the sacred month,” which could be a reference to the regulation of the lunar calendar. Since intercalation was banned by the Prophet in favor of a strictly lunar calendar, it is not difficult to see how this feature of the Kaaba might have been forgotten in later Arabic writings.
Since this alignment, too, could be the result of chance, the Kaaba and the possible significance of its astronomical alignments should not be considered in isolation, but rather in the light of other religious sanctuaries. The Kaaba is the only rectangular shrine known in Central Arabia, but there are others to the north and south, notably the Nabataean temples of Northern Arabia and the ancient temples of Southern Arabia. The orientations of these sites remain to be studied, but we know that the sun and moon were worshipped in at least some of the South Arabian temples. What more natural way to dedicate a temple to this worship than to orient it about the sun and moon’s risings and settings? There are also lines and circles of stones in Arabia reminiscent of those in Europe, whose function has so far escaped the archaeologists.
All things considered, it seems likely that the Kaaba was a kind of microcosm of the celestial and terrestrial universe of the Arabs before Islam. Each of the most important aspects of their physical world is represented: of the celestial, the sun, the moon, and Canopus, the brightest star in the southern sky; of the terrestrial, the winds, the rains, and the geographic directions. Unifying the cosmos of celestial bodies, winds, rains, and directions in this way would not have been strange to the pre-Islamic Arabs: astronomical and meteorological phenomena were intimately connected in their folklore.
What is more, the notion of an edifice to represent the heavens and the winds is attested to elsewhere in the ancient world. Vitruvius, the Roman engineer and architect, describes the octagonal Tower of the Winds in Athens, which dates from the first century B.C.E., as having been built to represent an eight-wind system. But the researches of Derek de Solla Price, of Yale University, show that the Tower was more than that. It contained, for example, an astrolabic clock. The positions of the stars, the sun, and a network of astronomically significant curves, including the local horizon and the meridian, were depicted on a circular plate rotated by a waterdriven gear mechanism. Price believes the tower was an architectural representation of “an interlocking set of theories covering virtually all creation and comprehending cosmology, chemistry and physics, meteorology and medicine.” (The Tower of the Winds apparently had no religious function.)
Price points out that a public clock in the classical world was not simply to indicate the time; rather, its function was to represent and somehow display the universe. (It is time to remember the public clock in Gaza – see below.)
The kind of dial in the Tower of the Winds, which displays the apparent rotation of the universe over the local horizon, is known also in other localities in the classical world; one fragment of such a dial has been found as far out in the provinces as a Roman settlement in Salzburg, Austria. Graeco-Roman sundials served a similar function, beyond merely indicating the hours of the day. They were in use all over the eastern Mediterranean world, and indeed one first-century C.E. sundial with inscriptions in Nabataean Aramaic has been discovered in the Nabataean settlement of Madā’in Salih in Northern Arabia. This brings us considerably closer to the Kaaba.
In Muslim traditions, the sanctuary was built by Abraham and modeled after a celestial counterpart, a kind of Kaaba in the sky. This legend, too, may attest to the original function of the Kaaba as a microcosm of a pre-Islamic Arab cosmology. But legends and alignments can never tell us, with absolute certainty, what the pagan Arabs who built the Kaaba really intended. What is certain is that the Kaaba has constituted a focus of Muslim life since the advent of Islam. Not only is it the focus of Muslim prayer, but the goal of every Muslim is to visit it once in a lifetime. No non-Muslim can appreciate the elevation of the Muslim’s soul when he or she beholds the Kaaba. For Muslims, the Kaaba is indeed the center of the world, the physical goal of their lives, a symbol of their religion, and, above all, a pointer to God.
“The Faces of the Kaaba” was intended for a general public, open to scientific concepts, but innocent of much knowledge of Islam.3 In 1982, when it was published, I was teaching Arabic at New York University, which explains the references to Manhattan and Washington Square. Also, I had visited Stonehenge several times as a kid, and it turned out to be not irrelevant to my subject, having something in common with both Manhattan and the Kaaba.
This new version is intended for anyone seriously interested in the history and function of the Kaaba. I have spent half a century with manuscripts that add to our knowledge of the Kaaba and its influence in Islamic civilisation. Readers today should be aware that 40 years ago, we did not really know how Muslims regulated the times of their prayers over the centuries or why many historical mosques appear not to face Mecca, as one might think they perhaps should. The Kaaba would have been to most Westerners nothing more than a curious big black box, venerated by adherents to an alien faith. The concept of a sacred direction toward the Kaaba, called qibla in all of the languages of the Muslim commonwealth, was perhaps generally realized along with the concept of five daily prayers, but Islam was not known to have inspired a sacred geography, as found in some other religions and cultures. The ways in which Muslims have regarded the Kaaba over the centuries have changed; it would take a whole book to describe this (and now that book is available – see below).
Changes have also been made in the way we moderns view the qibla or sacred direction in Islam. It is general knowledge that mosques are aligned in the qibla and have been so for centuries. “Mosques face Mecca”, everybody knows that. But it is not generally realized that the orientation of historical mosques is not the modern qibla, which is based on accurate procedures using accurate geographical data. To begin with, sometimes mosques were built adjacent to, or on top of earlier religious architecture, which might be cardinally or solstitially aligned. Then over the centuries, two principal methods were used to find the qibla in order to properly orient mosques: first, folk astronomical techniques, which can be viewed as attempts to face the Kaaba itself; and second, mathematical techniques using (inaccurate) medieval geographical data, which can be viewed as attempts to face Mecca. Clearly, the results would invariably be different from each other and from the modern qibla. This has misled some researchers into thinking that some historical mosques were not intended to face Mecca at all. In fact, mosques face the Kaaba, but in ways that made sense to those who built the mosques.
In 2020, Islamic art and architecture historian Simon O’Meara published the first book in any Western language on the Kaaba, the most important edifice in the Muslim world. His timely book, well researched (even to the point of having laudably quoted from my 1982 paper and various other of my works), documents the ways in which Muslims have regarded the Kaaba over the centuries and confirms much of what I wrote in 1982. He deals with the history of the Kaaba as a history of early Islam. Unlike other architecture historians, he paid due attention to the orientation of the Kaaba and stressed the importance of the qibla and sacred geography, as well as dealing with the Kaaba in art, geography, cosmology and mysticism. My present endeavour extends O’Meara’s book on the topics of sacred geography and mosque orientations.
In 2021, I published a (second) preliminary overview of the orientations of hundreds of historical mosques based on what people at the time thought was the qibla, which was sometimes inspired by the orientation of the Kaaba itself. The publication was premature, but part of a series in which I attempted to counter some false interpretations of early mosque orientations (see Crone & Cook, Gibson and Deus below). Certainly, in 2020 Simon O’Meara could only hint at the later influence of the orientation of the Kaaba because my overview of Islamic religious architecture – from al- Andalus to Indonesia – was published on the internet only in 2021 as “Historical Mosque Orientations”. That work contains, amongst much else, English translations of some 20 different historical schemes of sacred geography, found in treatises on sacred law (fiqh), geography, cosmography, folk astronomy, ephemerides and almanacs, encyclopedias, and treatises on finding the qibla by astronomical risings and settings (a genre of literature called كتب دالائل القبلة , kutub dalā’il al-qibla).
Does the orientation of the Kaaba fit into what we know about astronomy in Arabia before Islam? I personally think that it most certainly does, but we must forever beware of presentism, applying modern notions to historical matters. Pre-Islamic astronomical lore in Arabia is a vast subject that has yet to be presented to a modern audience. My former colleague from New York days, George Saliba, has published a very useful brief introduction to the subject. Numerous other historians have been more occupied with the Greek, Indian and Persian influences in later Islamic astronomy, so that the much less technical Arab tradition has been overlooked. Anyone who would work on the indigenous pre-Islamic tradition would do well to consult the works of such previous researchers as Paul Kunitzsch, Taufiq Fahd, Fuat Sezgin, Manfred Ullmann, Daniel Varisco, and others, and will soon find themselves immersed in pre-Islamic poetry, the Prophetic sayings and traditions (ḥadīth), Arabic lexicographical dictionaries, books on the lunar mansions anwā’ (kutub al-anwā’), books on finding the qibla by means of astronomical horizon phenomena (kutub dalā’il al-qibla), and books on God and His creation (kutub al-ʿaẓama). Just to give one example: I was interested in the names of the prayers, and I consulted five Islamic lists of names of the 12 seasonal hours of the day (sāʿāt) and the 12 seasonal hours of the night in the post-Islamic sources; these lists are most definitely pre-Islamic. This brings us back to the Nabataean sundial for indicating the seasonal hours of daylight. In addition, I think it is highly significant that the Kaaba, previously called edifice is البیت , al-bayt, or بيت الله, bayt Allāh, “the house” or “the house of God”, is associated in popular Muslim belief with a counterpart in heaven البيت المعمور, al-bayt al-maʿmūr. This is perhaps to be conceived as a way of saying, in ‘their language’, that the earthly Kaaba is associated with the features and influences of the heavenly Kaaba, including the stars, sun, moon, winds and rains. The seven circuits of the Kaaba which pilgrims perform are not unrelated to the sun, moon and five naked-eye planets. ‘Their language’, not ‘ours’.
B2 The sides of the rectangular base are roughly in the ratio 8:7 (here not to scale). The orientation of the Kaaba is described in various historical Arabic sources. The main axis of the rectangular base points toward the rising of Canopus ( مطلع سهيل, maṭlaʿ Suhayl). In the north it points to the setting of the stars of the Plough / Great Dipper (مغيب بنات نعش , maghīb banāt naʿsh); yes, they do rise and set in tropical latitudes. The minor axis extends between midsummer sunrise ( مطلع الصيف , maṭlaʿ al-ṣayf) and midwinter sunset ( مغيب الشتاء , maghīb al-shitā’). These directions are roughly perpendicular for the latitude of Mecca. The ‘cardinal’ winds are thought to hit the four walls of the Kaaba head-on. The rains are also associated with the edifice: if one wall is dry, the corresponding region of the world will be dry.
B12 There are surely numerous other schemes that have not yet been located. The few ones that were published have been overlooked by historians of Islamic cartography and geography because they are not ‘maps’ and the data in them is not always based on geographical reality; rather, they are reflect traditional knowledge. I do not claim that knowledge of sacred geography was widespread amongst Muslims centuries ago. I do claim that numerous influential authors record it.
Some 20 different schemes of sacred geography have been located in the vast manuscript sources available for the further study of the history of Islamic civilization. Some are these are described in texts; most are presented pictorially. The materials, found in legal texts, geographical works (rarely), treatises on the qibla by astronomical risings and settings, folk astronomical texts, astronomical works (occasionally), ephemerides and calendars, geographical texts (rarely), and encyclopedias, date from the 9th to the 19th century. Knowledge was not cumulative in historical Islam; each region had its favorite authorities. We do have evidence of sacred geography from the Maghrib to Iran and from Turkey to the Yemen, which is not bad for a start.
David A. King, “Historical Mosque Orientations – How to interpret them and how not – A preliminary survey”, 1328 pp., 2022, online at www.academia.edu/87024335/. [A survey of hundreds of historical mosques, their orientations interpreted using the means described in historical texts on sacred geography (astronomical risings and settings) and mathematical geography (longitudes, latitudes, trigonometry). Includes translations of all known schemes of sacred geography.]
Simon O’Meara, The Kaʿba Orientations, Readings in Islam’s Ancient House, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. [A timely first book of scholarly excellence in any language on the history and significance of the most important building in the Muslim world.]
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