This chapter concerns the Islamic prayer direction, or qibla. Facing the House by adopting the qibla is the most ubiquitous use of the Kaʿba, undertaken at every ritual prayer and every other ritual listed in the Introduction. In a book on the work of the Kaʿba, a chapter on the Kaʿba as the qibla is thus an appropriate place to start. As I shall show, throughout Islamic history not only have mosques been constructed in alignment with the qibla, something one has learnt always to expect, but much less consistently, urban settlements, too. Can it really be the case that the exorbitant, painstaking labour required to align these latter, ostensibly secular constructions results from ‘trivia’, as two celebrated academics have separately asserted?One aim of the chapter is to address this question, by bringing to the fore the extent to which rulers and patrons have lavished wealth to achieve this urban-wide alignment.

Another aim of the chapter is to ensure that the term qiblareally does denote the direction of the Kaʿba. This aim is necessary, because from the very beginnings of Islam such an exclusive denotation was not always the case. Rather, as I shall show, the term was sometimes anchored not to the palladium of the Islamic world but to an absolute, mostly divinely sanctioned authority in this world: a ruler, principally. Because the chapter is premised on the judgement that one of the works of the Kaʿba is its role as the qibla, it is necessary to verify at the outset that the qibla is indeed the direction of the Kaʿba and denotes the Kaʿba by implication. The chapter starts, hence, with a review of the history and meaning of the term, looking at its literal and symbolic meanings, not just its Islamic customary meaning as the direction of the Kaʿba.

Part One: The History and Meaning of the Qibla

When a qibla was first adopted for ritual purposes in Islam, and to where and what it first pointed, are questions without uniformly accepted answers.