Nahal La'ana Mosque

Mosque Name: Nahal La’ana Mosques

Country: Negev

City: Rural, Negev Highlands

Year of construction (AD): 700-799

GPS: 30.730121 34.599858

Gibson Classification: Mecca

Rebuilt facing Mecca: never

Description:

The mosque and farm excavated in Nahal La’ana during the Negev Emergency Survey were part of a settlement complex adjoined by large tracts of terraced farmland (Nahlieli and Israel 1988). The prayer room (5 m2; 1.8 m high) is in the southern wing. In the mounds of ash found near the structure were sherds characteristic of the end of the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods, and several Umayyad coins dating to the seventh and eighth centuries C.E.

For a Link to the Qibla Tool Click Here

Perhaps all of the Negev open air mosques used the same person or information when setting their Qiblas, and they all faced too far west. The nearest Qibla is Petra.

References:

Avni, Gideon, 1994. “Early Mosques in the Negev Highlands: New Archaeological Evidence on Islamic Penetration of Southern Palestine”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 294: 83-100. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.2307/1357155

Magness, Jodi, 2003. The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 148-149. https://archive.org/details/TheArchaeologyof_612

Nahlieli, Dov, Israel, Yigal, and Yehudit Ben-Michael, 1996. “The Naḥal Laʿana Site: An Early Islamic Farm in the Negev”, ʿAtiqot 30: *67-*78 (in Hebrew. English summary: 130).