Cartography

 Beginning of Map Making

Islam during its early empires was a very travel-based civilization. Although it was not a definite country or area of land, the Muslims were a religion-based empire which during its peak land mass came to take up most of modern day Turkey and the middle east. Originally, cartography was introduced into the Islamic empire mainly for the appeal of leaders and rulers (Karam, pg. 1). Over time, however, this changed as the empire progressed and they began to rely on travel and trade more and more. This is crucial because the Islamic empire was curated mostly of seamen and people traveling abroad which allowed map making and therefore the art of cartography to take form and develop further.

As previously mentioned, Islam is religion based. The central city that the Muslim faith is based on is known as Mecca, a city in Saudi Arabia referred to as “the holiest city in Islam,” Said to be the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the location of Kaaba. It is one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith that Muslims travel to this holy city one time in their whole life, named Majj and is mandatory just like the other pillars.  The Kaaba is a cube-shaped building located at the center of Islam’s mosque and holiest site. It is considered to be the house of god. 

This fact of the location of the Kaaba is important because a second early use or great factor for the development of map making in Muslim cultures is the finding of that city, the Mecca, in their day to day life. They crafted symbolic maps with Mecca at the center, using advanced math to calculate the direction (or Qibla) to which Muslims turned to for prayer which they followed five times daily. Although most maps early on would not use math, and rely on more facile methods like following local road directions or using the sun and stars. 

What to Take Away

Because of the sheer amount of reasons for cartography to take off in Islam, it was bound to succeed. With this significant improving process underway, it also paved the way for the invention of some cartographic machines and instruments. While not all were invented in Islam, many of them were at the least improved. The Kamal was a simple navigational tool made with wood and string from Islamic origin. The Kamal (meaning "guide" in Arabic) was a simple tool used for measuring latitude (Polat, pg. 1). In closing, because of the traversal nature of the Islamic empire and the large geographic space they were going over, many tools were invented and developed to be used to help accomplish this goal, also moving along the birth of map making into the Muslim community and igniting a spark for the art of cartography to come.