By Adrian Murphy

Dubai-based Muslim Heritage Consulting (MHC), which is behind the 1,001 Inventions exhibition that recently toured the United Kingdom, has announced that it will embark on a world tour ending in Dubai later this year.

1,001 Inventions:  Discover the Muslim Heritage in our World will now tour cities in Europe, North America, South Asia, and Australasia before visiting Middle East cities in Saudi Arabia, Jorda, Bahrain, and the UAE.

The exhibition showcases the history of Muslim science and inventions, which are largely unknown in western cultures in a period when most of Europe was in the Dark Ages.

Professor Salim Al Hassani, Chairman of the Science Technology and Civilization in Britain, which helped with the planning of the exhibition, said its success had prompted interest from around the world.

“The extent to which Muslims have contributed to western civilization in not generally wll-known,” he added.

“Yet this exhibition shows that Muslims have always shared the heritage that provides a platform for developments that make the western world tick.”

The exhibition in Britain was sponsored by the Home and Foreign Offices and the Department for Trade and Industry.

Ahmed Salem, general manager for MHC – which is the historical consultant firm behind the Ibn Battuta shopping mall’s 1,000 Years of Knowledge Rediscovered – said the exhibition would be split into four touring groups and hoped for similar support from governments in other countries.

“The exhibition is a great way of saying we all have something in common.  We are not just showing the inventions, but how the have had an impact on today’s life,” he added.

“It brings the community together and shares knowledge on the thinkgs created by other cultures and has really captures people’s interests.”

The MHC team, more than half of which is non-Muslim, has also called on the expert knowledge of scholars, including Emily Savage-Smith from Oxford University, who is a world authority on the history of medicine.

MHC also published a book to accompany the exhibition, which has already sold out of the 3,000 copies, and is now in the process of a second print worldwide sale.

>> Great Inventions
Examining 1,000 years of history from 500 AD to 1,500 AD, the exhibition brings to life inventions and innovations made by some of the great Muslim thinkers and includes

• The discovery of coffee and the development of the art of coffee drinking, by a man named Khalid in Ethiopia, who was a goat herder who noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry
• The inventions of the first pinhole camera by the 10th century Muslim mathematician and astronomer Ibn Al Haitham
• Making soap, as we now it today, was also an Arab discovery as they combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme.
• The fountain pen was invented by the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen that would not stain his hands.

By the ninth century many Muslim scholars believed Earth was spherical and the proof, said the astronomer, Ibn Hazm, “is that Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth”.