ISLAMIC PRAYER TAKES A WHOLE NEW SPIN
A lot of Muslims have for centuries been complaining that their prayers were not being heard by Allah. "We pray to Allah for rain. We get no rain. We pray to Allah for help in destroying the infidel. We get caught," complains Amin Al-Pforwon-Wahn-Phorall.
Now it appears the reason for this lack of Allah-intervention has been discovered.
When Muslims pray they are supposed to face the shortest way to the Kaaba Shrine in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Using a normal flat world map is an easy way to find which way to pray. For example, a normal world map shows that Muslims in Detroit should face southeast to get their prayers heard.
But this doesn't take into account the curvature of the Earth!
So a geographer from the UAE University produced a map for the everyday Muslim which allows one to find the true shortest distance to Kaaba based on a spherical globe. Now a prayer from Detroit takes a near-polar route to reach Mecca. Problem solved? Not quite.
It appears that two problems arise from this. One is that a prayer launched from Detroit passses throught Rome, symbolic home of the Christian infidel. For fear of being picked off by Catholic intercepters, MoTown Muslims must either launch prayers at a higher trajectory to go over Rome, or put a spin on their prayers which allows the prayers to curve around Italy altogether.
Another problem opened up by Islamic apologists recently is what the true shortest route to Mecca really is. Muslim mathematicians know the shortest route through a sphere is through it, not around it. Thus Muslim prayers should be directed through the Earth itself to get to Mecca. "This straight-through-the-earth method would solve the problem of anyone intercepting prayers or redirecting them elsewhere. One possible embarrassing problem here, though, involves the fact that Muslims on the other side of the world from Mecca - say, in the South Pacific - would actually have to pray into the ground itself; a potential health risk for the faithful. And no studies have been done to see if the prayers might be absorbed by the molten core of the Earth.
"We have a lot of work still ahead of us," says one of the faithful, "but some day we'll get it right."