World's Biggest Clock to be Started this Week; Saudis Dream of Replacing GMT

The world's biggest clock, which stands atop the under-construction world's second tallest building, is to be tested during this first week of Ramadan. The complex, which will include an enormous hotel to cater to Meccan pilgrims, stands near the Masjid al-Haram in the heart of Mecca. While the size and scale ranks it with the sort of architectural wretched excess we associate with the Burj Dubai (excuse me, Burj Khalifa), the Saudis have other ambitions for the big clock: they'd like to see Mecca time replace Universal Time (Greenwich Mean Time), at least in the Muslim world.

First, the size: as this Daily Telegraph comparison notes, it's some six times higher and the clock face diameter is six times bigger than Big Ben, which it otherwise loosely resembles in form. (Before the trivia commenters jump in: I know that "Big Ben" properly refers to the bell, not the clock, but apparently the Daily Telegraph doesn't.) The clock face will be covered in Italian mosaic tiles, 13,000 of them made from gold, and so on. The overall complex will contain hotels (one in the clock tower), a shopping mall, two helipads, prayer areas for 30,000, etc. Here's Wikipedia on the overall complex, being built by the Bin Laden group (yes, those Ben Ladens, but the ones who have denounced Usama: I'm sure some conspiracy theorists will pick up on this anyway).

Now, the GMT issue. Here are articles in English from Arab News, the Saudi Gazette, and, again, the Daily Telegraph on the issue. As the latter puts it:

According to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric known around the Muslim world for his popular television show "Sharia and Life", Mecca has a greater claim to being the prime meridian because it is "in perfect alignment with the magnetic north."

This claim that the holy city is a "zero magnetism zone" has won support from some Arab scientists like Abdel-Baset al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Centre who says that there is no magnetic force in Mecca.

"That's why if someone travels to Mecca or lives there, he lives longer, is healthier and is less affected by the earth's gravity," he said. "You get charged with energy."

Western scientists have challenged such assertions, noting that the Magnetic North Pole is in actual fact on a line of longitude that passes through Canada, the United States, Mexico and Antarctica.

Actually, that last paragraph overlooks the fact that magnetic North shifts about over time, and even the Saudi Gazette article refers to "scientific" evidence in quotes. The idea that Greenwich Mean Time (officially Universal Time today) is a colonial-era invention (some Americans once urged a prime meridian through Washungton) is a reasonable argument, provided you don't mind throwing out every navigational chart and map published in the last century and a half, and of course really messing up the GPS in the Saudis' own limos, since GPS cooirdinates are all based on the prime eridian. Of course, if the Saudis want to cite both longitude based on the Prime Meridian and longitude based on Mecca, as they cite both Hijri and Western dates on their newspapers, they're free to do so.