David A. King The Culmination of Islamic Sacred Geography I: The World about the Kaaba (Folk Astronomy), and II: The World about Mecca (Mathematical Geography) Abstract: In Islam, the sacred direction or qibla is toward the sacred Kaaba in Mecca, which edifice is astronomically aligned.Various ritual acts from prayer to burial are to be performed in the sacred direction. Muslim scholars devised two sets of solutions for finding the qibla from any locality. The first involved a sacred geography with the world divided around the Kaaba and the qibla in each sector defined by an astrono- mical horizon phenomenon. The second involved mathematical geography with the qibla calculated by exact or approximate mathematical procedures, albeit using me- dieval geographical coordinates. This dichotomy to some extent explains the orien- tation of medieval Islamic religious architecture. In this paper, the ultimate achieve- ments in each tradition will be presented and compared; a serious investigation of orientations is a task for the future. Keywords: Sacred geography, medieval, Islam, Ka’ba, Mecca, qibla, mosque, orien- tation, folk astronomy, mathematical geography, wind-catcher, Cairo, Egypt, Karl Schoy, Edward S. Kennedy The sacred geography of Islam functioned in two different ways. Essentially, we can associate these with the world about the sacred Kaaba and the world centred on Mecca on a terrestrial globe. These activities belong to the scientific traditions of the Muslims which focussed on inner-Islamic ideas. None of what they did in this field was / would have been of any practical interest to anyone in medieval Europe or anywhere else outside the Muslim world. The Islamic tradition of folk astronomy developed in the seventh century out of pre-Islamic astronomical folklore of the Arabs of the Peninsula. It was adapted to meet the needs of the developing Muslim society and flourished until the early modern period. The Islamic tradition of mathematical astronomy developed out of Muslim contact with Indian, Persian and Hellenistic/Byzantine Greek sources in the eighth and ninth centuries. In a remarkable renaissance that is not yet really understood, it adapted itself to the needs of the new Muslim society on a different/ higher/ more sophisticated level. It flourished in various regional manifestations from the Maghrib David A. King, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, d.a.king@orange.fr, www.davidaking.academia.edu https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686159-008