tokatlas
Teacher account

Finding the direction of prayer

From the Middle East and North Africa·An enduring case

Determining the qibla from any city is a problem in spherical trigonometry, and medieval Islamic mathematicians developed sophisticated solutions and instruments because prayer made the calculation a daily necessity across an empire. A ritual obligation functioned as a standing research programme.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

ExplanationGrounds of Knowledge
An account of why something is the case rather than merely that it is. Explanations are judged by more than accuracy: scope, simplicity, fruitfulness and the ability to say what would have happened otherwise all matter, and these criteria can pull against one another.
CultureThe Knower's Lens
The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Methods and tools
The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.

Areas of knowledge

Themes

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.