The answer to the question, “What is the oldest building constructed in the world?†is definitely “the Kaabaâ€. No center in the world is visited as much as the Kaaba. Thus, with the present situation, Makkah and the Kaaba has become a center that has a uniting, combining and gathering role for people by eliminating the political borders. In no other place are people connected to a religious center continuously, 24 hours a day.
“The first House (of worship) appointed for men was that at Bakka: full of blessing and of guidance for all kinds of beings: In it are signs manifest; (for example), the Station of Abraham; whoever enters it attains security.†(Aal-i Imran, 96-97).
The Kaaba, to which people turn while praying, is the center of the Old World (Europe, Asia and Africa). It is almost equally far away from the three continents. It has a strategic importance and is located in the focal point of the transportation centers.
If you take hold of a world map and draw a straight line from North America to Australia and a straight line from South-East Asia to South America, you will see Makkah, hence the Kaaba in the point of junction. You should start from the endpoints of the continents while drawing the lines.
Is the center of the lands, Makkah (or rather the Kaaba), also the center of the world? Geographers divided the word into small squares symbolically with latitudes and longitudes in order to be able to find any point in the world more easily and to show them correctly in the most practical way. However, the beginning points of those lines were determined theoretically and arbitrarily. There is no definite scientific truth about it. For instance, the line of longitude that is accepted to pass from Greenwich, England is accepted as 0 (zero). It is known that the world, which is accepted as round, is actually bulgy in the middle. The latitude passing from the middle of that bulgy region is regarded as the “0†latitude. That latitude is known as the Equator. It is accepted that the Equator relatively divides the world into two equal parts.
The poles are the two endpoints of the axis passing from the center of the circle formed by the Equator. However, the reality is not like that. It is something that is accepted. The world has the real north and south poles. We know that the world rotates on the liquid iron-nickel like a dynamo and that during the rotation it forms electromagnetic field and electricity like a dynamo. That magnetic force exits from the north and south poles and forms the protective outermost layer of the atmosphere called the magnetosphere. Therefore, in the northern hemisphere, the compasses always points to the north pole.
Why are the poles that the latitudes and longitudes show are in different places from the magnetic poles that compass show? We know that the world has an inclination of 23° 27’ elliptically. If the world did not have an inclination like that, we would always have the same season; for instance always the summer or the winter. Days draw in and draw out because of it. That inclination changes the places of the poles, too. If we take into consideration the real magnetic north pole and the real magnetic south pole while drawing the latitudes and longitudes, we will have a new Equator. Then, that Equator, which is the greatest latitude with the number 0, will pass from the middle of Makkah. It denotes that the Kaaba is in the middle of the world.
On the other hand, the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer drawn according to the corrected form will pass from the block where Makkah is located. The latitude drawn in the same way will intersect with the tropics and the Equator in the same block. The intersection point will be Makkah again. The fact that those latitudes and longitudes intersect with each other in Makkah shows that the location of the Kaaba was determined specially and shows why people turn to the Kaaba while praying. Thus, it is understood that the Kaaba is the center of the continents now, and when the world was in the form of a big continent in the past.
