The Azimuth of Truth, the Magnetism of Error: Learning what the Qibla was in Medieval North India

This paper presents an exploration of how correct praxis was understood, learnt and undertaken.The qibla, fundamental to Islamic prayer and discipline, was implicated in daily praxis and monumental activity alike, and was reckoned and known by various techniques and means. This paper proposes an archaeology of how learning what the qibla was shows that from mortuary datasets we can understand how persons in the past debated what the best means to reckon it were.

The paper provides a detailed archaeological case-study of how the qibla was reckoned by a community, whose materiality was always suspect, as converts, in medieval north India. Drawn from a larger project studying the archaeology of conversion to Islam in medieval North India, it presents analyses of how the orientation of graves, mosques, tombs and other buildings changed between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries on the arrival of the new technology of the compass. 

The compass provided a scientific and authoritative means for reckoning the qibla, yet, the secular variation of the earth's magnetic field rendered it fallible, and 'errors' so caused became apparent only a few centuries later. This archaeology of the striving for 'correct orientation', especially amidst a community of converts, demonstrates how varied social and immaterial forces, of hierarchy and of magnetism dovetailed to make and unmake the 'correct' and the 'erroneous'. On these grounds the paper argues for the salience of such im/material assemblages within the Islamic discursive tradition. It also argues that attention to the qibla opens new avenues for mortuary archaeology, especially in contexts where it is politically salient to not excavate graves.