Prince anchors prayer poser
NZPA-ReuterCape Canaveral A Saudi Arabian Prince, the first Muslim in space, spoke at the week-end of a novel space problem — the difficulties of performing Islamic prayer rituals while hurtling in orbit hundreds of kilometres above the Earth. Prince Sultan ibn Salman ibn Abdulaziz, a nephew of King Fahd, said, “When I do my prayers, I am not able to do a complete ‘sujood’, a bowing down, because it’s difficult to perform and may cause sickness.” To overcome the problem, the Prince said, during his prayer sessions he had staked out a corner of the crew’s galley where he anchored himself to the upright bar of an exercise treadmill to avoid floating away. Muslims in prayer traditionally bow their foreheads to the ground in the direction of the holy city of Mecca. But the Prince, one of seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery, has received a special dispensation that allows him to pray without having to face Mecca.
An Islamic scholar, realising the problem of finding Mecca while hurtling in
space at 28,000km/h, let the Prince off the hook, saying that not even Allah could ask him to do the impossible. “Our speed is about 30,000km/h. We can go from Mecca to Jeddah before I finish my sentence,” the Prince said. The distance between the two Saudi Arabian cities is about 80 km. The Prince also suffered from the problem of space sickness. “The first couple days in the shuttle were not easy because of problems adapting to the zero-g (gravity),” the Prince said in his native Arabic. “Some sickness is felt, just like sea sickness. Now I feel a little heavy in the head and back,” the 28-year-old, dark-haired Prince said in a 10-minute tape in Arabic made on the third day of the mission. The prince was impressed with the sights and speed of space travel. But he reduced space flight to earthbound terms when describing the experience for his fellow Saudi countrymen, likening the steering of the 100-tonne shuttle to “the navigation of Bedouins in the desert.”
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Press, 24 June 1985, Page 6
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344Prince anchors prayer poser Press, 24 June 1985, Page 6
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