مركزية مكة المكرمة في العالم الإسلامي : تحليل مكاني باستخدام نظم المعلومات الجغرافية

الملخص EN

Many studies have been published about the location of Makkah Almukar- ramah.

Those studies were made by researchers from specialties other than geography.

They all depended on dif-ferent traditional and Islamic referenc-es.

Geographers should have present some work on this important issue for it is related Makkah the Islamic capital and the Qiblah for Muslims.

Muslims numbers increased to more than one and a half milliard persons.

The criteri-on adopted in the present study for la-beling a state as a" Muslim State " is when it is registered as a member of the existing ” Congress of Islamic States ”.

The authors of the present study have published a detailed study about the spatial relationship between Makkah Almukarramah and the cities sized no less than half million persons using GIS technology.

They took into considera-tion the most important variables like population sizes and the distances from Makkah to all the selected cities.

That study proved Makkah is the geographic core of human settlements represent¬ed by the selected cities.

Geographic studies when taking location centrality analysis should restrict to one varia¬ble, but should add the analysis of the rest of the spatial analysis as we go in consequence of the positional study to show the fact that came out from spatial geomathmatical analysis through GIS.

The question, here, is: how is the spatial relationship between Makkah and each of the selected cities of the Muslim world? Could the centrality of Makkah be proved here as proved in the previ¬ous study for the whole world? In the present study 1972 cities within the Muslim world with 50000 person from 56 Muslim states perfectly poi-soned on maps.

The centrality of Mak- kah and the systematic arrangement of cities around it is again examined without looking to the results of the previous study.

Added to that the pres-ent study tried to inspect the reality of the centrality of the location of Makkah and the importance of that position and to explain the geographic urban char-acteristics results.

Using GIS restored almost perfect results as it enabled the comprehensive geomatic cartographic analysis and that is one of the goals tar-geted in this study.

Words key: GIS, Muslim word, city, geography of city, Distance, Euclidian, Arc distance, Vincenty, Distribution, Makkah Almukarramah, and Centrality.