As in, Mecca Mean time.
MM: Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.
Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.
The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.
One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.
He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed…
The problem with that thinking is Greenwich Mean Time, and the global coordination of time pieces, was invented by the British some 160 years ago.
As the United Kingdom grew into an advanced maritime nation, British mariners kept at least one timepiece on GMT in order to calculate their longitude from the Greenwich meridian, which was by convention considered to have longitude zero degrees. This did not affect shipboard time itself, which was still solar time.
(...)Greenwich Mean Time was adopted across the island of Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House in 1847, and by almost all railway companies by the following year from which the term "railway time" is derived. It was gradually adopted for other purposes
The Royal Observatory makes no absurd claim of being the "true center of the earth", it just makes sense to start the time zones from where your own location. The concept of global travel was new at time, and the Brits should be given credit were credit is due.
But if you want to divide the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, then it's important to separate yourself from the Kafr, robbing them of their scientific advances while claiming moral superiority.
