Meeting in Qatar, a group of Muslim clerics and scholars proposed replacing Greenwhich Mean Time (GMT) with Mecca Time, according to this BBC report.

So the Prime Meridian and the central reference points for global coordination (the military certainly knows what it is like to operate in a GMT+5 battle space) would shift from the United Kingdom to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. (HT: Tanguy Veys)

Why? The reasons given are an admixture of pseudo-science and grievance history. The meridian that runs through Mecca perfectly aligns with the magnetic North Pole, or true north. This may be true for now, but it is meaningless. The magnetic North Pole is constantly moving. What happens when it perfectly aligns with the Gagnes–move the Prime Meridian to India and recalculate all the time zones?

The second argument is relies on a dangerously false reading of history. The British “had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power…”.

Actually, no. British and French scientists were racing to map and understand the globe and time in the 19th century. The French contribution was the kilometer, supposedly equal to one forty-thousandth of the distance between the pole and the equator. The base-10 measurement system (a fascination of French revolutionaries and those they influenced) was eventually voluntarily adopted by all but two countries in the world (the United States and Myanmar).

The British contribution was the Prime Meridian, a baseline that enabled a unified global system of time zones. Every nation has voluntarily accepted it, including dozens of powerful states that Britain never ruled. Of course, one could have put a prime meridian anywhere. The Brits simply picked the meridian closest to London. It is telling that they were practical enough to pick a city that a meridian actually passed through rather than drawing a line on a map through Buckingham Palace and forcing all the time zones to be based on some weird fractions.

And, yes, there have always been some politics to time zones. Spain was in the same time zone as the U.K. until Franco joined the “continental” time zone out of “solidarity.” But most such political changes have been minor and practical (tiny island governments that did not want to their people divided into two time zones and so on).

So should the Mecca Time proposal be adopted? Here are some good reasons for staying with the status quo:

The Cost of Change is Greater Than the Benefits. For most people, the change would have no cost at all. The alarm still rings at 7:30 and happy hour still starts at six. But computer programmers, telephone network managers, satellite operators and military officers would have to make a lot of costly adjustments to get right back where they are now.

The “benefit” is purely ideological. There is a movement among some Arab scholars called “Ijaz al-Koran”–using science to support what the Koran says. Yes, they might be jazzed if all of the world’s clocks were based on the same place the world’s one billion Muslims pray toward. But what of the planet’s other four billion? They might be nonplussed in same, small immeasureable way that the Muslims were pleased. (And millions in all religions simply would not care.)

Mixing Religion and Time is a bad idea. The British, at the height of their power and the apex of their belief in the Anglican Church, did not make the Prime Meridian run through Canterbury. They realized, if they considered it at all, that it is best to have a neutral system, not one seemingly allied with one confession over another.

Mecca Times would violate a long standing tradition–the right of the discoverer to name his discovery. The British discovered and developed the system and gave it to the world. They named it, just like they named Halley’s Comet. We still refer to our numbers as “Arabic numerals” because they were developed by the Arabs, who incidentally have abandoned them for Hindi numerals. When the Arabs present the world with a useful discovery, they can name that one too. Shouldn’t the English be given the same right to name discoveries as the Arabs?