A Saudi cleric has publicly claimed Earth is a static object orbited by the sun, suggesting that if it was not, aeroplanes would not be able to reach their destination.
Sheikh Bandar Al Khaibari is believed to have been speaking at a university lecture in the UAE when he told the students that centuries of evidence suggesting Earth rotated around the sun was false.
A 30-second video published on the Daily Mail website shows him explaining his theory.
“We go to Sharjah airport to travel to China by plane, clear?! Focus with me,” he tells the unseen audience, according to a translation on the video.
Picking up a small plastic container of water, he continues: “This is Earth; if you say that it rotates, if we leave Sharjah airport on [an] international flight to China, the Earth is rotating, right? So if the plane stops still in the air, wouldn’t China be coming towards it? True or not?
“If the Earth rotates on [sic] the other direction, the plane will not be able to reach China, because China is also rotating as the plane rotates.”
The Islamic scholar attempts to back up his argument with religious statements and quotes from other Islamic clerics, the Daily Mail said.
He also claimed the NASA lunar mission was Hollywood fabrication and that humans have never been to the moon, Al Arabiya reported.
The video has unsurprisingly been a hit on social media, with some commentators using an Arabic hashtag that translates to #cleric_rejects_rotation_of_Earth.
One user pointed out that the footage first appeared February 15 – the 451st anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s birth. Galileo was famously twice accused of heresy by the Catholic Church after publicly supporting the Copernican theory that the Earth and other planets rotate around the sun.
Follow us on
