This probably belongs in the "Religion and Philosophy" forum.
Although I included a comment or two concerning Christian Orthodoxy, the thesis is that the spread of islamic sciences from the seventh century onwards was a heavy blow to the popularity of flat earth belief, and both the facts I have stated and others which I can show testify to this. The central concern of my post is flat Earth history which may include analysis of factors (including religious systems) which support flat Earth science or combat it.
I had earlier been led to believe (as had many others) that the late Shiekh Ben Baz, the Mufti of Saudi Arabia while King Fahd was in power during the 1980's and 1990's issued flat Earth fatwas demanding belief ina flat Earth based on articles like these:
http://www.salafitalk.net/st/viewmessages.cfm?Forum=14&Topic=841&keywords=abdulbaasitHowever, I later found that this was not true:
"Between 1993 and 1995, various newspapers and magazines published accounts that ibn Baaz, whose duties included the presidency of the administration for scientific research, had said that the Earth is flat. Baz strongly denied that claim, describing the allegation as a "pure lie" and saying that he only denied Earth's rotation.
Supporters of Ibn Baz said that the book in which the flat earth claim was supposed to have been laid out does not exist, and that the entire controversy was based on one interview with Egyptian journalists. They said that Ibn Baz, as he clarified later, was referring to the surface of earth that we walk on being flat although he believed the Earth to be spherical. In Arabic, the same word is commonly used for both the earth as well as the ground. The journalist, having not paid attention to this distinction, misquoted Ibn Baz and created a story; the story was picked up by a Kuwaiti magazine (Assiyasah) and from there spread around the world."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd-al-Aziz_ibn_Abd-Allah_ibn_BaazBen Baz himself stated that he only talked of a flat Earth because it appears that way to the naked eye, but it was in his view only figurative language because he "knew" the world was round.
In my opinion, despite some flat Earth language to the contrary, it seems that such language is not hardly winning flat earth advocates but is rather used to repress any possible development of serious or genuine flat earth inclinations or thought among muslims. And this seems to be in keeping with muslim tradition and consistent throughout islamic history.
Seemingly pro-flat earth passages in the koran were deliberately included in order not to alienate the predominantly pro-flat Earth Christian majority which constituted the status quo during the formative era of islam.