[2:142] The fools among the people will say, 'What has turned them from the direction they were facing in their prayers formerly?'
The eyes of the disbelievers were weak so the correct view was not apparent to them in all the circumstances of the believers. They looked with an eye to finding ugliness and let loose their tongues in opposing everything that was and would be from [the believers]. They did not see anything new without bringing forth a new objection to it. That included the change in the matter of the qibla when it was shifted to the Kaʿba. They said that if their qibla had been right, what was it that turned them from it? So He said:
[2:142 cont'd] Say: 'To God belong the East and the West. He guides whomever He will to a straight path'.
The servants worship towards any region and direction they will. Similarly the companions of absence and those veiled from witnessing the Real's granting of free agency to His friends, seek only certain aspects of the affair and bring their own states to bear upon them. If they had seen the whole with singular vision, they would have been saved from the pain of divisive thinking, the distraction of accursed thoughts, and the claims of fractured conjecturing, but God guides whom He wills to His light.