This chapter concerns the work of the Kaʿba as the Islamic world‘s navel: its axis and generative matrix.The aim is not to rehearse Mircea Eliade's ideas of the sacred centre as they apply and can be applied to Mecca. Those ideas have been covered by others. Rather, the aim is to understand how the Kaʿba is said to orient the world, and then to explain what it is about the Kaʿba that makes this orientation conceivable. To achieve these aims, the chapter is in two parts.

Part one discusses the Kaʿba's orientation of the world, as represented in the early Islamic sources. This part would seem to be an extension of the previous chapter's discussion of the Kaʿba's orientation of urban space; and indeed it is, except that in discussing world orientation we shall simultaneously see what it is about the navel of Mecca that distinguishes it from other alleged omphaloi in the Islamic oikumene. On the basis of the early Islamic sources, we shall see that the world is said to be oriented to the Kaʿba because it is generated from the Kaʿba.

Part two argues that the Kaʿba has a world-orienting capacity because, as evidenced in the early Islamic sources, the Kaʿba is construed as having the attributes of a bifurcated, bilateral body – a human body. As I shall show, only this type of body can orient space. The crux of the matter of orientation per se will be addressed at this point, namely, why a human being is fundamentally an orienting being.

Part One: The Orientation of the Kaʿba

David King is widely regarded as the academic who brought to scholarly light what had been unknown, ignored or forgotten regarding the Kaʿba’s astronomical function and its celestial-cum-meteorological orientation. In his account of those findings in the The Encyclopaedia of Islam, he succinctly – perhaps, too succinctly – explains the complexities of this celestially motivated function and orientation, whilst simultaneously correcting the widespread view that the Kaʿba is cardinally oriented.