Sunday, September 11, 2005
You know, at first I thought all the hubbub over the shape of the proposed Flight 93 Memorial was just a lot of blogosphere creativity feeding on itself -- with maybe a dose of insanity and a dash of bigotry thrown into the mix. But after seeing that the memorial will be aligned in such a way as to orient visitors to face Mecca, I'm thinking there may be something to it. Is that map accurate? Is it an accident? Is it significant?
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I have what I think is a marginally cleaner version here or here.
I too thought the controversy was somewhat overblown, until I saw Zombie's animation, and read that the architect himself describes the shape as a crescent.
Even after that, I didn't think it actually pointed at Mecca; it didn't look like it to me. I made the diagram intending to debunk that claim. I thought it risked making the concern over the architect's intentions look silly. I thought I was going to demonstrate conclusively that there was no way to reasonably construe the shape as pointing toward Mecca. I was mistaken.
Is it accurate? Well, the diagram accurately represents the information available. The 'crescent' is clipped directly from the PDF on the project's site, which includes a direction marker.
Even if a better map turns out to show that the crescent actually faces two or three degrees off the line to Mecca, that's still too close; even if this is just an unfortunate coincidence, there is no good reason to build a memorial that could on any remotely reasonable grounds be read as an insult to the memory of the victims and heroes of Flight 93.
(Incidentally, the world map centred on the crash site was produced using the free Generic Mapping Tools software package.)
By the way, I'm a regular reader of Solomonia, rather than just here by chasing links, and appreciate your work.
Hey, thanks very much for your comment. I'm glad you read the blog. It's a small internet after all.
I wonder how accurate Muslim folk need to be with the direction issue when orienting their own structures for prayer?