How Islam Invented A Bright New World

We all know that thousands of familiar items were invented, discovered or created by Scottish ingenuity. The television, Tarmac, penicillin, radar and, more recently, Dolly the sheep are just some of them.

But how many of us realise that coffee, clocks, deodorant, the fountain pen, libraries, sofas, surgical instruments, toothpaste, chemistry, herbal medicine, town planning, vaccinations and even the crankshaft - among thousands of other inventions - have a claim to originate in the Muslim world between the seventh and seventeenth centuries?

Too many of us in the west are unaware of the enormous contribution Islamic scholars have made to our cultural and social life. In an attempt to shed light on this largely ignored "golden age" of scientific innovation, Salim al Hassani, chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation and emeritus professor at Manchester University, has created an interactive exhibition called 1001 Inventions, which opened yesterday at the Glasgow Science Centre.

The Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Babylonians also have claims to incredible creativity, but al Hassani's point is that the Islamic world's contribution is often sidelined. "If it had not been for Muslim inventions, we would not have had the Renaissance, nor present-day civilisation.
"Western history books tend to jump from Greek times to Newton and Einstein, so there's a huge gap of knowledge that needs to be filled in the interests of social and cultural cohesion, and even world peace."

This 1000-year gap is a fluke of history, not a conspiracy, he says. However, he believes the time has come for recognition and acknowledgment. "Because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the west, as an alien culture, society and belief system, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history."

The exhibition has a message for non-Muslims and Muslims alike. "In the post-9/11 era there have been tensions in world relations," says al Hassani. "I want non-Muslims to recognise their neighbours, but there is also a message here for young Muslims in Britain: recognise the contribution of your ancestors. These people expressed their religiosity through beneficial contributions to society and humanity.

"Young Muslims should also learn that great inventors were men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim, working in harmony together. This track record of co-operation over the centuries, although deeply rooted within early Muslim society, seems to have been forgotten. The 1001 Inventions project taps directly into that tradition by seeking to develop a better understanding between peoples and cultures."

Professor Robert Hillenbrand, director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, based at Edinburgh University, also believes the exhibition is timely. "The Arab world is one of the big four global players today, along with Russia, China and Japan," he says. "Scottish students are still choosing to learn French, but who do you think is going to run the planet in 100 years' time? Not the French."
Here, then, are 10 of the inventions for which we should thank the Muslim world

Camera obscura

Although the Greeks had written treatises on optics, it was the ninth-century polymath al Kindi who first laid down the foundations of its modern study, discussing how light rays came in a straight line and the influence of distance and angle on sight.
This was built on by Ibn al Haitham in the tenth century, and his Book of Optics is still quoted by professors 1000 years on. During his practical experiments he used the term al Bayt al Muthlim, which was translated into Latin as "camera obscura". His Book of Optics was translated into Latin by the medieval scholar Gerard of Cremona, and this had a profound impact on the thirteenth-century big thinkers such as Roger Bacon and Witelo, and even on the later works of Leonardo da Vinci.

Coffee

More than 1200 years ago, legend has it that coffee was discovered by Ethopian Arab goatherds when they noticed their goats became more lively after eating certain berries. These berries were boiled, and became known as al Qahawa. It was a Turkish merchant, Pasqua Rosee, who first brought coffee to the UK in 1650.

Clocks

In 1206, the mechanical engineer al Jazari, working for the Urtuq kings of Diyarbakir in Turkey, was commissioned to write a book on engineering. It described 50 mechanical devices, including the first water-powered astronomical clock, a programmable humanoid robot and the crankshaft.

Toothbrushes and toothpaste

In the sixth century, the Prophet Muhammad is described as believing bad breath and food bits in your teeth were unhygienic, and scrubbing his teeth with a twig of miswak before each prayer. Although the Chinese can lay claim to a sixteenth-century version of the toothbrush, miswak is still used today - and a Swiss pharmaceutical company has since discovered that it has antibacterial properties.

Deodorants

In his tenth-century medical encyclopaedia al Tasrif, the physician and surgeon al Zahrawi included a chapter devoted to "cosmetology" and elaborated on perfume and perfumed stocks, rolled and pressed in special moulds - like today's roll-on deodorants.

Libraries

Although the Greeks and Romans had houses of scrolls open to the public, they were not lending libraries. Muslims began producing books in the eighth century because they knew how to make paper and were encouraged to record all their experiments. The Abbasid Caliph al Ma'mun paid translators the weight of each book in gold that they translated from Greek into Arabic. This produced a vast stack of books. Mosque libraries were called dar al-kutub, or the house of books.

Chemistry

Many scholars give the title of the father of chemistry to Jabir, or Gerber, ibn Hayyan, born around 722, the son of a druggist from Iraq. His use of experimental method in alchemy is seen as influential to this day.

Fountain pens

Before pens as we know them today came other writing instruments, including the qalam or reed pen. The most sought-after reeds came from the coastal lands of the Arabian Gulf. Each style of script required a different reed, cut at a specific angle. Calligraphers usually made their own inks and kept the recipes secret.
The language of Arabic calligraphy belongs to the family of ancient semitic languages, the most famous of which are Kufic and Naskh. The Kufic script comes from the city of Kufa, Iraq, where it was used by seventh- century scribes translating the Koran. Calligraphy is still used today for writing the Koran.

Surgical instruments

In his medical encyclopaedia, the aforementioned al Zahrawi introduced a staggering collection of more than 200 surgical tools. Their design was so precise that they have had only a few changes in 1000 years, and it was these illustrations that laid the foundations for surgery in Europe.

Post and mail

In fourteenth-century India, couriers took messages to the Muslim sultan sitting in Delhi. A man carrying a rod with copper bells on the top would sprint as fast as he could for one-third of a mile, and on hearing the bells the next man would get ready to take the mail. It took only five days for a message to get from the eastern edge of India to the capital.

http://www.theherald.co.uk/

Who Was the First Scientist?

"I am pleased to see your comment about the contributions of all the Muslim scholars, especially Ibn al-Haytham. I would add that he not only contributed to the field of optics, but also was the first person to insist on systematically testing hypotheses with experiments, earning himself a place in history as the first scientist. If your readers would like to know more about him, I would encourage them to read my new book Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist. It is the first full biography of the eleventh-century Muslim scholar known in the West as Alhazen or Alhacen. "
Posted by Bradley to Cem Nizamoglu at 20 November 2007 10:43

We live in a scientific age. Millions of young people study science, thousands of universities teach it, and hundreds of publications chronicle it. We even have a cable channel devoted exclusively to its wonders. We are immersed in technology rooted in its discoveries. But what is science, and who was its first practitioner?
Science is the study of the physical world, but it is not just a topic, a subject, a field of interest. It is a discipline—a system of inquiry that adheres to a specific methodology—the scientific method. In its basic form, the scientific method consists of seven steps:
1) observation;
2) statement of a problem or question;
3) formulation of a hypothesis, or a possible answer to the problem or question;
4) testing of the hypothesis with an experiment;
5) analysis of the experiment’s results;
6) interpretation of the data and formulation of a conclusion;
7) publication of the findings.One can study phenomena without adhering to the scientific method, of course. The result, however, is not science. It is pseudoscience or junk science.
Throughout history, many people in many parts of the world have studied nature without using the scientific method. Some of the earliest people to do so were the ancient Greeks. Scholars such as Aristotle made many observations about natural phenomena, but they did not test their ideas with experiments. Instead they relied on logic to support their findings. As a result, they often arrived at erroneous conclusions. Centuries later the errors of the Greeks were exposed by scholars using the scientific method.
Perhaps the most famous debunking of Greek beliefs occurred in 1589 when Galileo Galilei challenged Aristotle’s notions about falling bodies. Aristotle had asserted that heavy bodies fall at a faster rate than light bodies do. His contention was logical but unproven. Galileo decided to test Aristotle’s hypothesis, legend says, by dropping cannon balls of different weights from a balcony of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He released the balls simultaneously and found that neither ball raced ahead of the other. Rather, they sped earthward together and hit the ground at the same time. Galileo also conducted experiments in which he rolled balls of different weights down inclines in an attempt to discover the truth about falling bodies. For these and other experiments, Galileo is considered by many to be the first scientist.
Galileo was not the first person to conduct experiments or to follow the scientific method, however. European scholars had been conducting experiments for three hundred years, ever since a British-born Franciscan monk named Roger Bacon advocated experimentation in the thirteenth century. One of Bacon’s books, Perspectiva (Optics) challenges ancient Greek ideas about vision and includes several experiments with light that include all seven steps of the scientific method.
Bacon’s Perspectiva is not an original work, however. It is a summary of a much longer work entitled De aspectibus (The Optics). Perspectiva follows the organization of De aspectibus and repeats its experiments step by step, sometimes even word for word. But De aspectibus is not an original work, either. It is the translation of a book written in Arabic entitled Kitāb al-Manāzir (Book of Optics). Written around 1021, Kitāb al-Manāzir predates Roger Bacon’s summary of it by 250 years. The author of this groundbreaking book was a Muslim scholar named Abū ‘Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham.
Born in Basra (located in what is now Iraq) in 965, Ibn al-Haytham—known in the West as Alhazen or Alhacen—wrote more than 200 books and treatises on a wide range of subjects. He was the first person to apply algebra to geometry, founding the branch mathematics known as analytic geometry.
Ibn al-Haytham’s use of experimentation was an outgrowth of his skeptical nature and his Muslim faith. He believed that human beings are flawed and only God is perfect. To discover the truth about nature, he reasoned, one had to allow the universe to speak for itself. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them,” Ibn al-Haytham wrote in Doubts Concerning Ptolemy, “but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration.”
To test his hypothesis that “lights and colors do not blend in the air,” for example, Ibn al-Haytham devised the world's first camera obscura, observed what happened when light rays intersected at its aperture, and recorded the results. This is just one of dozens of “true demonstrations,” or experiments, contained in Kitāb al-Manāzir.
By insisting on the use of verifiable experiments to test hypotheses, Ibn al-Haytham established a new system of inquiry—the scientific method—and earned a place in history as the first scientist.
Bradley Steffens is the author of twenty-one books, coauthor of seven, and editor of the 2004 anthology, The Free Speech Movement. His Censorship was included in the 1997 edition of Best Books for Young Adult Readers and his Giants won the 2005 San Diego Book Award for Best Young Adult & Children's Nonfiction. His latest book is Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist, the world's first biography of the eleventh-century Arab scholar known in the West as Alhazen.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bradley_Steffens
Also: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ibn-Al-Haytham-Scientist-Profiles-Science/dp/1599350246/

Al-Qahwa - Coffee

Coffee was discovered by the Muslims sometimes around the 10th century. It was first used and cultivated in Yemen. Instead of eating the beans, the Yemenis boiled them creating the famous drink of “Al-Qahwa”. There is also consensus that the first users of coffee were the Sufis who used it as a stimulus to stay awake during late night Thikr (remembrance of God). Coffee spread to the rest of Muslims of Yemen and eventually to all the Muslim world through travellers, pilgrims and traders... (1001 Inventions Book, Page 12-13)

· 1.6 billions cups of coffee are drunk worldwide everyday… (http://www.muslimheritage.com/ )
· It was a Turk named Pasqua Rosee, a merchant in 1650 CE who first brought the coffee into UK (in Europe 1945) (http://www.muslimheritage.com/ )
· Coffee houses was an place of wisdom which scholars gathered to discuss and study ‘ilim’ (theology as well as science)
· Also today’s popular Coffee house trend like (from Lloyds Coffee House to) Starbucks, Caffe Nero etc. comes from the assimilation of this enlightenment
· The English word "coffee" first came into use in the early to mid 1600s, but early forms date back to the last decade of the 1500s. It comes from the Italian caffè and the French, Portuguese and Spanish café. These, in turn, were borrowed from the Ottoman Turkish kahveh, borrowed from the Arabic qahhwa. (http://en.wikipedia.org/)

· The origin of the Arabic qahwa (قهوة), is uncertain. It is either derived from the name of the Kaffa region in southern Ethiopia, where coffee was cultivated, or by a truncation of qahwat al-būnn, meaning "wine of the bean" in Arabic. (http://en.wikipedia.org/)

Noahs Ark

To see the place where it is thought that Noah’s Ark came aground, go to Uzengili village, 25 km east of Dogubeyazit. Be sure to try the local dessert asure (Noah’s pudding), believed to have first been made by Noah’s wife from the last bits of food in the Ark.

Click Here To See Video About This Noah Ark

The Elephant Clock

The elephant clock was a medieval Muslim invention by al-Jazari (1136–1206), consisting of a weight powered water clock in the form of an elephant. The various elements of the clock are in the housing on top of the elephant. They were designed to move and make a sound each half hour. A modern full-size working reproduction can be found as a centrepiece in the Ibn Battuta Mall, a shopping mall in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Another working reproduction can be seen outside the Musée d'Horlogerie du Locle, Château des Monts, in Le Locle, Switzerland.

Mechanism
----------------------------
The timing mechanism is based on a water-filled bucket hidden inside the elephant. In the bucket is a deep bowl floating in the water, but with a small hole in the centre. The bowl takes half an hour to fill through this hole. In the process of sinking, the bowl pulls a string attached to a see-saw mechanism in the tower on top of the elephant. This releases a ball that drops into the mouth of a Serpent, causing the serpent to tip forward, which pulls the sunken bowl out of the water via strings. At the same time, a system of strings causes a figure in the tower to raise either the left or right hand and the mahout (elephant driver at the front) to hit a drum. This indicates a half or full hour. Next the snake tips back. The cycle then repeats, as long as balls remain in the upper reservoir to power the emptying of the bowl.

Automaton

This was the first clock in which an automaton reacted after certain intervals of time. In the mechanism, a humanoid automata strikes the cymbal and a mechanical bird chirps, like in the later cuckoo clock, after every hour or half hour.

Passage of temporal hours

Another innovative feature of the clock was how it recorded the passage of temporal hours, which meant that the rate of flow had to be changed daily to match the uneven length of days throughout the year. To accomplish this, the clock had two tanks, the top tank was connected to the time indicating mechanisms and the bottom was connected to the flow control regulator. At daybreak the tap was opened and water flowed from the top tank to the bottom tank via a float regulator that maintained a constant pressure in the receiving tank.

Flow regulator

The mechanism employed a flow regulator, which was used here to determine the time when the clock strikes at hourly intervals. The hourly intervals were determined with the use of a small opening in a submersible float, which was calibrated to give the required rates of flow under different water rates.

The float regulator was later a common mechanism during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, when it was employed in the boiler of a steam engine and in domestic water distribution systems.

Closed-loop system

This appears to be an early example of a closed-loop system in a mechanism. The clock functioned as long as there were metal balls in its magazine.

20 Islamic Invention That Maybe You Don't Know

"From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them" Published: 11 March 2006

1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.

2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.

3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.

4 A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.

5 Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab nostrils, was that they did not wash. Shampoo was introduced to England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.

6 Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.

7 The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other inventions was the combination lock.

8 Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there from India or China. But it certainly came to the West via the Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder climates such as Britain and Holland.

9 The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle architect was a Muslim.

10 Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable to a modern surgeon. It was he who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it. Muslims doctors also invented anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.

11 The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.

12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.

13 The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.

14 The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the basis of modern cryptology.

15 Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat, then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn Firnas - see No 4).

16 Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims, thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representational art. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say earthy, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned". Carpets, unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.

17 The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.

18 By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km - less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.

19 Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.

20 Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim gardens include the carnation and the tulip.

"1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World" is a new exhibition which began a nationwide tour this week. It is currently at the Science Museum in Manchester. For more information, go to http://www.1001inventions.com/.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article350594.ece