At the outskirts of the solar system there is the Oort Cloud, where comets come from—bound to their eccentric orbits, circumambulating the Sun like throngs of Hajjis around the holy black cube of Mecca. The granite relic is strangely reminiscent of the alien monolith that confounds Stone Age homo sapiens in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that sense a journey to the Qaaba simulates particles drawn by the pull of gravity to an Axis Mundi, a primordial sanctorum, the fulcrum of universal motion. Collision of the pilgrims en masse creates a bridge between the pilgrim and the cosmos, a direct encounter with smallness and infinitude.
Across the earthly sphere namazees face this conspicuous cube five times a day, a cube sitting upon a sphere - as if they were small magnetic dipoles aligning themselves to a vast, invisible geomagnetic field extended by the black cube across the earth, tracing its ley lines of unshakeable faith.
Like the Moon which always presents the same face to the Earth, even as it rotates around it. The ritual sighting of the Moon is perhaps a symbolic act of social “flash mob” astronomy. Because these traditions are based on a terrestrial geometry, as the Islamic faith moves into space—the practice of its rituals will become more mathematically intricate. How does a Muslim astronaut face Mecca from orbit? What does ghurrat al hilal (sighting of the moon) mean on the planet Saturn which has more than 60 moons? If the moon to be observed is the Earth’s … we might even see a religion adopt the tenets of astrophysics, going so far as to calculate the speed of light and relativistic effects.
Nowhere is the worship of pure geometry more evident in Islamic art than in calligraphy and tessellation. The name of God is repeated across a 2-dimensional sheet of spacetime like a crystalline mirror, a theory of everything without the need of any other words. There is some historical evidence that translations of Plato and Euclid may have contributed to this strange syncretism of geometry, mysticism, and cosmology.
That the world of sensations is a hologram, projected from the 2-dimensional surface of a black hole … is a very new idea in physics, among the many attempts at achieving a theory of “quantum gravity,” but if it succeeds, Islamic calligraphy in particular will acquire a prophetic hue.
