How Islamic inventors changed the world
How Islamic inventors changed the world
By Paul Vallely
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/science/archive/060325/science3.htm
From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we in the West take for granted. Here are 20 of their most influential innovations:
(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 Makkah 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 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 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206) 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.
However, 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. The architect of Henry V’s castle 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. Muslim 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).
(16) Carpets were regarded as part of paradise by mediaeval 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. 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) Mediaeval 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. (Courtesy: The Independent)
Enquote" This sort of reminds me of a book published a while ago entitled (I think), "How Star Trek Changed the World". "
if i understood incorrectly iam sorry.
Don was praising this part of the world! "In any case civilized knowledge was at least kept alive here during Europe's Dark Ages"
Apologies for earlier semi Hijack - I did say I had digressed and quit :D
Careful Don dont provoke people without just cause
Didn't Muslims invent the process of distillation?
Now that was one invention that really changed the world.
This sort of reminds me of a book published a while ago entitled (I think), "How Star Trek Changed the World". In any case civilized knowledge was at least kept alive here during Europe's Dark Ages and there was certainly the amalgamation of Eastern and Western knowledge and cultures here for many centuries.
andrew11121, I'm a bit disappointed with the sweeping generalisation of the Arab world you made above.
I usually enjoy reading what you write :(
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Love is the answer...
Its still better than name calling and abusing and all that. Chk this site and comments of last few days.
..**.. ""They walk among us. They vote & they even reproduce"" ..**..
Wow i cant believe it
Another thread that ends with sextual inclinations
What were the chances of that?
way too visually graphic ! :D
There is this joke.. i dont remember it completely. but here it goes
A girl had a very tall bf and after spending their first night together comes home. Her mother askes her how is he. girl is a bit confused and mother can see that.
After lot of convinving the discussion goes like this;
Girl: He held me tight
Mom: Good
Girl: He kissed me
Mom: Good
Girl: Then he carsed me and kissed me all over
Mom: All is going gr8, where is the problem.. does he love you
Girl: Oh!!!! He does a lot but only one thing irritates me
Mom: And what is that
Girl: He makes love to me in standing position and after some time rotates me like a helicopter propeller
..**.. ""They walk among us. They vote & they even reproduce"" ..**..
when their toesies touched
his nose was in
when their nosies touched
his toes were in
tee hee (just a childish rhyme your comment reminded me of :P)
But I digress, and as you say "no more discussing this topic of Adam climbing"
Paul Vallely CMG is a leading British writer on Africa and development issues. He first coined, in his seminal 1990 book Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt, the expression that campaigners needed to move "from charity to justice" – a slogan that was taken up by Jubilee 2000 and Live 8.
Vallely was the The Times correspondent in Ethiopia during the great famine of 1984/5. He was commended as International Reporter of the Year for his reports which Geldof described as "vivid, intelligent, moving and brave". Vallely was the only British correspondent to leave the easy air routes to the feeding camps and strike off across country to find out what was really going on. He uncovered a number of things the Marxist government were trying to keep hidden, was pronounced “an enemy of the revolution”, arrested by the secret police and was expelled from the country. He subsequently reported from across Africa, and elsewhere, covering wars and events in 30 different countries across the globe.
In 2004/5 he was co-author of the report of the Commission for Africa set up by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, of which Bob Geldof was a member. Vallely ghost-wrote Geldof's autobiography, Is That It? and travelled with Bob Geldof across Africa to decide how to spend the £100m raised by Live Aid and was involved in the organisation of Live 8.
Bob Geldof paid tribute to his influence in a lecture to the Bar Human Rights Committee Lecture, St. Paul’s Cathedral in which he said: "In his book Bad Samaritans of 1990 Paul Vallely wrote correctly: 'For all his skill as a populist Bob Geldof could not shift the agenda from one of charity to one of justice.” Well maybe after 20 years we’ve finally got there." The founders of Jubilee 2000, Martin Dent and Bill Peters, have also acknowledged being inspired by Vallely's book.
Vallely has chaired or been active in a number of prominent UK aid agencies, including Traidcraft, the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), Christian Aid and CAFOD.
He is associate editor of the UK newspaper The Independent where he writes about ethical, cultural and political issues. (He was once referred to by Peter Wilby in New Statesman as "the Independent's resident saint"[1]). He is also a columnist for The Church Times and Third Way Magazine.
Again, He would have kissed better things at a height somewhere between 50 and 60 feet.
I am no more discussing this topic of Adam climbing, for it might go out of hand any moment.
..**.. ""They walk among us. They vote & they even reproduce"" ..**..
NOT how far up a mountain Adam climbed lol
I read your post and at first thought you were going to say Adam had to climb 118 feet up to Eve's face for a kiss! lmao
If a man has to climb 118 feet in vertical position, He would have taken a day to reach to the top and my midday would have reached to the centre. I guess what ropes he would have used.... Thats on a lighter note. No hard feelings.
..**.. ""They walk among us. They vote & they even reproduce"" ..**..
That is a piece of news was Adam in Ark with Noah is that how he reached Adams Peak??
Opps... well spotted Angry and Jauntie :p
according to the link I put above about Eve's tomb
"The tomb is of an unusual shape, being almost 400 feet long and only ten feet wide. The common legend has it that Eve was one hundred and eighteen feet tall. The proportions of the burial tomb causes problems unless Eve was exceedingly thin".
118 feet tall is quite a good height for a woman, so who knows how tall Adam was! Wouldn't have been baby steps he took :P
Adam stepped off the Ark?
Erm I don't think Noah pre-dated Adam - in fact I didn't think anyone did! :D
Andrews do Moslems believe that Adam had an Ark too ?
I've been to Adam's Peak. It's really beautiful up there in the hill country.
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Love is the answer...
Most Muslims are not of the Arab race.
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Love is the answer...
Muslims believe Adams Peak is said to have the footprint of Adam.
Buddhists believe the same mountain has the footprint of Buddha.
And Hindus believe that Shiva once took a stroll up there.
Since there is only one footprint up there, there's some pretty good stories about where the other one is. Some Buddhists believe that the left foot is on the mountain and the right foot is 150km away in Thailand. Presumably he took some steps in between? Maybe??
For the Muslims and Christians and some Jews, it's the first step Adam took when he got off the Ark. This doesn't really explain what happened to all those animal tracks though, does it?
Is it fair to use Arabs and Moslems interchangeably andrews112211 ? I'm not sure but in south America there is a country in the North called Suriname were there are a lots of Moslems but they don't look Arab - Maybe they are descendants ?
because he DID go to Sri Lanka aka Ceylon. Ended his days there, I think.
" It seems Adam and Eve lived the last part of their lives separated, and Adam ended up in Ceylon, where the faithful can find his tomb. Adam had something to do with the erection of the shrine at Mecca, then he left for other parts of the world."
http://www.geocities.com/islamimiracles4/tomb_eve.htm
The link is really to do with 'traditional beliefs' about Eve, but mentions that bit about Adam.
A SriLankan chap told me that there's a mountain the Sri Lankan called Adams peak.
I happened to be talking to someone yesterday about Eve's tomb being in Jeddah and was looking it up on the internet. I think tradition has it that Adam, having had something to do with the erection of a shrine in Mecca, ended up in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was known). Not sure he first laid his foot there though.
Not arguing with you, just an observation.
Good point, Nigel. It is interesting to note actually that it was during the 'Dark Ages' that the Arab empire flourished most, in the 6th and 7th centuries AD. At this time the Arab Empire covered all of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, modern day Iran, half of Turkey and almost all of modern day Spain and Morocco.
Charlemagne, after conquering much of Europe in the 7th century, then drew on the educational heritage of the British Isles, Italy and Spain (and hence a lot of the Arab empire).
Helloqatar's comment is actually quite true as well. In recent times the notion of educational growth has floundered in the more devout Muslim countries, while in the UK, for instance, a survey of Muslims revealed that 40% wanted to live under Sharia law.
It would be a wonderful thing to see the Arab world known for scientific endeavours, but at the moment it seems to be a region of people unsure of the benefits of seatbelts, anti-smoking campaigns and using mobile phones on aeroplanes.
What shuaib... is trying to say is the entire human race were living in a jungle and all our gardens (or did we had them) were naturally made by the creator. After that what happened is our creator delegated the job to earthly souls and etc etc etc.
India and China has been written few times.. Does Shuaib know that historically middle east used to be a sort of midway for the traders from east and west to meet and conduct business. This natuarally proves all good things / inventions & discoveries of west were traded and given to east and vice versa.
..**.. ""They walk among us. They vote & they even reproduce"" ..**..
Lets face it most things have an Indian origin - I mean didnt Adam (AS) first lay foot in SriLanka which was then part of the Indian Cont.
wise perceptive comment ngourlay
My fav things:
coffee = Ethiopia
chocolate = the Aztecs
potatoes = pre-Inca civilisations
No 20.... gardens were used way b4 then by the Maya
N0 14 .... Mayans also used the concept of 0 b4 Babylonians
I like the bits that say probably from India originally but developed in......
It's no good coming up with Muslim inventions, because it misses the point, and encourages people to say: "if the carpet is on the top-20 list of Muslim inventions, it's not a particularly important culture."
The *real* importance of Muslim history (ignoring its religious importance) is that the Muslims kept alive the culture of the Greek and Roman philosophers while Europe dived into the Dark Ages.
If Muslim culture hadn't existed, there would have been nothing for the European renaissance to rediscover. It would have taken several hundred years for Europeans to rebuild the Greek foundations of Mathematics, Science and Philosophy, and the Enlightenment would have happened much later.
-nigel
The 'pointed' (or Gothic) arch was first used by the Assyrians, Angry.
As for point number two, 'Qamara' may be the Arabic word for room, but the word came to english from the Greek word 'kamara' with the same meaning. I don't know how you can determine which word is the older of the two.
As for Galileo, don't make the mistake of thinking that he was the first westerner to think the world was round. Indian thinkers in the 7th century BC wrote on the daily rotation of a spherical earth, as did the Greeks 400 years later.
Copernicus was one of the first astronomers to write on the topic in the 15th century. Galileo's real claim to fame was the development of the telescope and advancing astronomy, not so much his contention that the earth was round and orbited the sun.
It seems that all the inventions stopped (along with thinking) many years ago. Nothing new to report in the last couple of 100 years.
How on earth is the 'pointed' arch a Muslim idea ? I mean it's a shape right ? I accept the Muslim came up with the first wheel but the 'Pointed' arch ?
I think a little less cut-n-paste and a bit more cut-n-think are in order inside of QL.