How Islamic inventors changed the world
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
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, whic h 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 th e 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 co nstruct 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 p arachute, 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 p erhaps 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 t hyme 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 Su rgeon 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 worl d 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 Euro pe'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 defen ded 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 str eams 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 5 0 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 combinat ion 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 (Black bird) 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 crys tal 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 basi s 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 d rawn 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 cou rt 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 Mus lim
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.
Discuss » Current Issues
How Islamic inventors changed the world..
(22 posts)-
mirshow
MemberPosted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 18:02 # -
mirshow
MemberCan somebody email this article to Hassan Nisar the Chorah walla anchor on Geo Tv, he is always talking about mislim contribution in the field of science...thanks.
Posted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 18:05 # -
mirshow
MemberMuslim contribution sorry for the mistake above.
Posted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 18:05 # -
If we need to be confined to past only like “pidram sultan bood”, then it is fine. But what we contributed in present times is equally important. A nation must not sit down idle because their forefathers did all for them centuries ago.
Our forefathers had the vision which we badly lack today.
Posted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 18:16 # -
mirshow
Member@adnak
No it is not just like pidram sultan bood, check this web site muslims are still in the business & dont forget Dr. Abdus salam, Dr Samarkand, Dr. Abdul qedeer & our neighbour Dr. Abdul kalam. http://www.1001inventions.com.
Posted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 18:23 # -
Assalam-o-Alaikum-Warahmat-ULLAH ALL,
@adnak: Have you heard about Atiq Raza ? Have you heard about his work, his accomplishments ?
We are sitting idle today, because those who are ruling over us are putting ALL of the state's money, land, resources in their own personal pockets. That is trillions! of rupees, which has been taken out of the economy, hundreds/thousands of acres of land which has been embezzled from the state.
Furthermore, due to political turmoil, unstable Govt. policies, many local traders have sent their money abroad to keep their money's worth intact or to flourish.
As soon as the above is resolved, you will see great strides from this nation INSHALLAH.
This nation needs its money brought back, put back! into its economy. Once;
(1) this money is (INSHALLAH);
(a) spent on well-being of the people
(b) spent on education
(c) put back in circulation in our economy(2) political turmoil ends, and
(3) Govt. policies reflect stabilityyou will yourself start watching next generation products coming out of our nation.
Please don't spread discouragement through your words.
Posted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 18:38 # -
change_is_close
MemberWas it Columbus who discovered America?
http://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/mamerica.html
http://www.themodernreligion.com/ht/before-columbus.htmlPosted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 19:08 # -
change_is_close
Member@haris
"you will yourself start watching next generation products coming out of our nation."progression is for the nations that adopt an ideology, i.e. a creed which answers the basic questions about life, and solutions for issues of life (i.e. systems) that emanate from it. this is what makes previously ignorant ppl become the rulers of the world. the ignorant arabs ruled the world after adopting an ideology; communists rose after adopting an ideology; ignorant europeans (busy in in-fighting) became the leaders of the world after adopting the capitalist ideology (having the secular creed). bro, ideology is very, very powerful. you know after how many years of founding of the Islamic State in medinah did muhammad bin qasim reach india??? JUST 80 years... not 800 years!!! and even that in the days when the means of travelling were limited. THIS, my friend, is the power of ideology. unless we return to our ideology, we won't be able to progress, even if all of our mountains are truned to gold - just see what the rich arabs are doing today, with all the oil.
Posted 1 month ago on 08 Feb 2010 19:18 # -
Muslims forefathers were great .
and we have been proved ourselves useless successors ,so far .Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 7:35 # -
PAKI.SECULAR
X-memberMuslims and Science by Dr. Pervaiz Hoodbhoy is a good book to understand why muslims 'golden era' of science ended in 11th/12th AD !
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 7:43 # -
The tragedy is that people don’t want to understand, they are happy that ‘pidram sultan bood’.
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 7:51 # -
PAKI.SECULAR
X-memberYes, our nation seems to be a victim of nostalgia !
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 7:53 # -
Assalam-o-Alaikum-Warahmat-ULLAH ALL,
@change_is_close: Yes, I agree. Islam is what helped us move towards betterment. When mankind chose to be obedient to ALLAH ALMIGHTY, by accepting that which came from ALLAH ALMIGHTY, they moved towards betterment.
That is why, those who go against Islam, I call them traitors to Muslims.
They are;
(1) causing distortion in our society
(2) spreading roumers in the name of righteousness
(3) dividing our people into factions
(4) keeping our people busy in spending their time in calculating who is right and who is wrong
(5) destroying peace of mind of our peopleleaving no time, no peace of mind to live their lives in the direction of betterment.
I believe we need to HANG!!! those among us in OPEN!!! PUBLIC!!! those who engage in the above mentioned activities against Muslims, regardless of who or what they are.
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 8:31 # -
Haris Khan
Can you do any thing other than hanging people? Is this what Islam teaches you?
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 8:49 # -
Salam
memberlolzz.. adnak is really worried about himself :)
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 8:50 # -
PAKI.SECULAR
X-member@Nostalgic Muslims
Please advise me how many scientific inventions/discoveries were made by muslims in las 800 years !
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 9:59 # -
Only one but that is the most significant than the whole world could do, suicide bombers, that can kill any one, and yet Muslims are proud of being Muslims.
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 10:37 # -
Salam
memberActually it is not about question of how many inventions were made under the rule of Islam, the real question is that does Islam hinder inventions or development of science & technology? We know that Europe had bad experience of religion where they suffered because of their religion, but Muslims enjoyed golden age under Islam where advancements in the field of science & technology were made.
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 10:50 # -
Another vague statement as usual. Please tell specifically what advancements in the field of science & technology were made during enjoyed golden age or it is sufficient to rely on ‘pidram sultan bood’.
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 10:57 # -
Salam
memberNot a vague statement my dear, it is a very clear, precise and concise statement for purveyors of secularism.
Regarding your "pidram sultan bood" phrase, it has already been answered amicably, I don't think I need to copy that again to remind you :)
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 11:01 # -
Please do that favour too
Rejoice friend, don't take tension.
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 11:13 # -
Salam
memberI care so I also take tension, not sure about you who is in a mood of rejoice despite seeing people in great difficulty :)
Posted 1 month ago on 09 Feb 2010 11:18 #
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