Bin Laden Group's Saudi clock: Should Mecca Mean Time replace Greenwich Mean Time?

Since days when the Sun refused to set on the British Empire, England's Royal Observatory in Greenwich served as Earth's reliable timekeeper -- a testament to industrial-era utilitarianism. Though the term Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) has for a generation been fading in favor of a new phrase, Coordinated Universal Time, the clock in England -- and the time zone -- remains valued, right up there with the up-to-the-microsecond timekeeping offered by the atomic clock in Boulder, Colo. But now the backers of a big, new clock being built on top of the second largest skyscraper on the planet in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, one of Islam's holiest cities, want GMT to step aside. "Mecca Time" should be the center of all earthly time, they argue.

The clock, which will make Big Ben look almost quaint when it is complete, will have the words "God is Greatest." It will overlook the Grand Mosque, a site of Muslim pilgrimage. "Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time, this is the goal," Mohammed Al-Arkubi, general manager of the skyscraper, the Royal Makkah Tower Hotel, tells the Arab News in Saudi Arabia. 

Never mind that GMT also is valued for its longitude: 0 degrees, 0,' 0.''

The Saudi Bin Laden Group construction company behind the $800-million clock engineered by European clockmakers is moving forward. And yes, the company is in the family of Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who has disavowed such wealth as a corruption of his faith.

Image: A mock-up of the Makkah Clock Tower (or Mecca Clock Tower) and the proud, but humble clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England