Al Khamees & shape of Earth
in his response to a question about how to reply to those claiming that the earth is flat and not round, scholar othman al khamees said smilingly, that he does not agree with those who say the earth is flat and he also doesn’t agree with those who believe it is spherical.
al khamees added that both parties do not have evidence to support their claims which means both can be right or wrong. he said the issue does not deserve to get into a dispute and whoever adopts any of the two opinions does not have to defame the others or hurt them.
over the centuries, tens of thousands have been humiliated in addition to those who have been murdered, tortured, and accused of atheism from the different cultures, in our region and in europe because they said the earth is round. eventually, al khamees said the issue does not deserve to be disputed and he is neither with, nor against the two opinions.
he ignored the religious texts from one side and the scientific facts from the other side. does he believe that the earth is pentagonal, hexagonal or what? strangely, he did not consider the opinion of space scientists who proved that the earth is round.
i had a personal experience more than sixty years ago when i was sitting next to my father’s car, waiting for him to leave to visit a patient in amiri hospital.
the weather was wonderful that day, and the seawater was as clear as oil spilled in a huge vessel, and i do not know what prompted me at that moment to think about what i had read or heard, days before in school, about the round shape of the earth, and how it could be so, and the difficulty of imagining that the waters of the seas and rivers did not spill on the side bottom of the earth, for example? or the way people walk in australia, hanging, their heads down and their feet stuck to the ground above them?
i saw on the distant horizon, while i was walking in my thoughts, what looked like a stick sticking out on the surface of the water, so i kept watching it as it approached the coast as it grew larger and increased in length as if it were a column emerging from the sea, then it turned into something like a pen planted in the middle of a large body that floated, and not long before i found out, what i was seeing was only a huge ship heading for land, and the shaft was nothing but her high mast.
i wondered to myself as if i were isaac newton of his time, why did i see the mast of the ship on the horizon, or the pole that carries its sails, before seeing the body of the ship, which is larger and more massive than the mast...by degrees? my questions continued before i came to the conclusion that the reason is due to the sphericity of the earth. if it were flat, it would have been logical to see the ship, as a whole, as it was coming towards me, before seeing the upper end of its mast, then the entire mast and then the entire hull of the ship, and the reason was that it was coming from a slope or a curvature that represents or proves the earth’s curvature!
i was pleased with my “scientific results” and decided to tell my father about it when he returned. when he heard my theory, he replied curtly: “don’t eat hay and weed”... that is, a lot.
