Muslim Innovation:
A thousand years of scientific discovery is regaining its rightful place in History.

From surgical implements to rockets, Muslims developed the technology.  Now, new exhibitions are challenging the West’s view of the past, says James Reinl

The History of innovation and technology is currently being rewritten to fill the “gaping hole” between AD1500 when Europe languished in the Dark Ages and the Muslim World was flourishing with inventiveness.

Professor Salim Al Hassani, chairman of the Foundation of Science, Technology, and Civilization, is the one those leading the current rethink, managing an exhibition in the United Kingdom, of Islamic World inventions that showcases everything from rockets to fountain pens.

The touring display, 1,001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in our World, draws from the same research as the 1,000 Years of Knowledge Rediscovered exhibition that is due to open early next month in Ibn Battuta Mall, Dubai.

Both displays highlight the Golden Age of Islam and challenge the popular lisconception that the Muslim World has added little to human technology, science, and philosophy.

“Take, for example the book Scientists and Inventors:  The People Who Make Technology from Early Times to Present Day by Anthony Feldman and Peter Ford, dated 1979,” says Al Hassani.  “The authors explain that the book lists in chronological order mankind’s scientific and technological progress.”

The compendium features early Greek inventions, such as Aristotle and Archimedes, before making a “remarkable jump of 1,600 years” forward, to Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, says Al Hassani, an Iraqi-born Briton.

“Some books include a bit more on the Romans, but they still leap over 1,000 years, completely ignoring the vast contributions to science, technology, and civilization and its interaction with other cultures,” he adds.

Al Hassani says there is a “dangerous gap” being fostered in schools and the West’s “textbooks, novels, magazines, newspapers, and television” that fails to highlight historical reality.

“This hole in our knowledge of a 1,000 missing years of history, science, and technology” creates an “entrenched, but… incomplete view of history, and our shared culture and values has pervaded much of the existing texts, leading to a distorted and… ignorant debate on the interaction between Islam and the West”, he says.

Ludo Verheyen, the brain behind the Ibn Battuta Mall exhibition of Islamic inventiveness, shares Al Hassani’s concerns , having been educated in a European classroom steered clear of Islamic World inventions.

MIDDLE EAST IGNORED
“At school, I was educated with the history that described his this period as the Dark Ages, when there was not much happening,” says the director of Dubai-based MTE Studios.

“But when you go back to the subject, you find a wealth of knowledge and information that has not been properly communicated to the world.

“A lot of inventions that are claimed in the Western world were actually discovered in the Middle East.”

The 48-year-old Belgian visited the exhibition in Manchester, United Kingdom and describes it as “nicely put together”, featuring items from his own show, such as replica of the glider of Abbas Ibn Firnas, the daredevil scientist from Spain who took to the skies in AD875, and the surgical implements of the 10th century medic Abdul Qasim Khalaf Ibn Al Al Abbas Al Zahrawi.

Verheyen maintains the UAE exhibition is on “a completely different scale”, featuring models of water systems and the 11th century “noria” wheels that remain a landmark of Hama, in Syria.

He nevertheless, says both exhibitions portray the Muslim World as “sharing knowledge of a great civilization” to transcend the “negative stories” expressed in mush Western media.

Al Hassani says a greater understanding of how many Islamic innovations fit into world history will help prevent rows- such as the controversy over the publication of cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) – from bring “blown out of proportion”.

“The extent to which Muslims have contributed to Western civilization is not generally well-known,” adds the emeritus professor of the Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering Department as the University of Manchester’s Institute of Science and Technology.

“Yet, these ancient scholars from the Islamic Word gave us many of the everyday things we use today, such as coffee, soap, and clocks.

“This exhibition shows Muslims have always shared the heritage that provides a platform for the developments that makes the Western world tick,” he adds.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
THE INVENTIONS OF THE MUSLIM WORLD            

From coffee to decorative gardens and three-course meals, the Muslim World has fostered many innovations that we take for granted in daily life.  As new exhibits open in Dubai and the United Kingdom, we nominate 20 of the most influential inventions from Islam’s Golden Age.

By Paul Vallely

COFFEE
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 eatinga 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 to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions.

By the 15th century, coffee had arrived in Turkey, from where it made its way to Venice in 1645.  it reached England in 1650.  The Arabic qahwa became kahve, then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.

CHESS
A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know 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.

SURGICAL IMPLEMENTS
Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design as those devised by a Muslim surgeon called Al Zaharawi. 

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 Al Zaharawi who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate the lute strings) and that it can also be used to make medicine capsules.

THE POINTED ARCH
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 first used by the Romans and Normans.  Other borrowings from the 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.  Henry V’s castle architect was also a Muslim.

NUMBERS
The system of numbering in use all around the world is probably Indian in origin, however, the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians, Al Khwarizmi and Al Kindi in AD825.

Algebra was named after Al Khwarizmi’s book, Al Jabr was Al Muqabilah, much of whose cnrents are still in use.

Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the Muslim World.  And Al Kindis’s discovery of frequency analysis is rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble.

THREE-COURSE MEAL
Ali Ibn Nafi journeyed from Iraq to Cordoba in the ninth 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].

THE CAMERA
The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enable us to see.

The first person to realize that light enters the eyes, rather than leaving it, was 10th century Muslim mathematician, astronomer, and physicists, Ibn Al Haitham.

He invented the first pin-hole camera, after noticing the way light came though a hole in window shutters.

The smaller the hole, the better picture, he worked out, and set up the first camera obscura [from the Arab word qamara for a dark room].  He is also credited with bring the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.

GLIDERs
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 AD852, he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba, using a loose cloak stiffned with wooden struts. 

He hoped to glide like a bird.  He did not.  But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor insuries.

In AD875, 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 10 minutes but crashed on landing – concluding correctly, that it was because he had not given his winged device a tail, so it would stall on landing.

THE FOUNTAIN PEN
The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in AD953 after he demanded a pen that would not stain his hands.

It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.

THE WINDMILL
The windmill was invented in AD634 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.

Mills had six or 12 sails, covered in fabric or palm leaves.  It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.

THE SPHERICAL WORLD
By the ninth century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was 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 realization 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.

CHEMISTRY
Distillation was invented around the year AD800 by Islam’s foremost scientist, Jabir Lbn Hayyan., who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatuses still in use today – liquefaction, crystallization, distillation, purification, oxidization, evaporation, and filtration.

He also invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rose-water and other perfumes.

THE CRANK-SHAFT
The crank-shaft is a device that translated linear into rotary 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 a Muslim engineer called A- Jazari, to raise water for irrigation.

His AD1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, and was the father of robotics.

CARPETS
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, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, … pings and other abominations not fit to be mentioned”.

DECORATIVE GARDENS
Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the Arabs who first developed the idea of the garden as being a place of beauty and meditation.

The first series of royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened in the 11th century, in Muslim Spain.

SOAP
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.  But it was Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide, and aromatics, such as thyme oil.  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. (© The Independent)

QUILTING
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 is 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 cottage industry in colder climates, such as Britain and Holland.

CHEQUES
The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money being carried across dangerous terrain.

In the ninth century, a Muslim businessman was able to cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.

ROCKETS
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, labelled 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.

INOCULATIONS
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 against smallpox 50 years before the West discovered it.