2/115 — "Wherever you turn"
"To God belong the east and the west. Wherever you turn, there is the face of God. God is all-encompassing, all-knowing."
One of the widest-horizoned verses in the sūra, and it needs careful reading, because it is open to two misunderstandings at once.
فَثَمَّ وَجْهُ ٱللَّهِ — "there is the face of God". The word wajh, as we saw at verse 112, though it means "face", can stand for the whole and for turning towards. The widespread understanding here is "the direction to which God's good pleasure is turned" or "the side of turning to Him".
What the verse says: God cannot be confined to a place. A direction is not holy in itself. Between east and west there is no difference in respect of nearness to God; both are His.
What the verse does not say: that direction has no importance at all. Indeed the same sūra will give the command of the qibla a few verses later (2/144) and require the turning to the Kaʿba in prayer.
The two do not conflict, because they speak of two different things. The qibla is not the direction in which God is — it is an arrangement that makes unity visible. Millions of people turning to the same point is not because there is a holiness at that point but because scatteredness is itself a problem. This verse does not make the qibla meaningless; it says what the qibla is not.
Indeed this distinction is made by the Qurʾān itself immediately after the qibla verses: "Righteousness is not that you turn your faces to the east and the west" (al-Baqara 2/177).