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How
Muslim inventors changed the world
by By Paul
Vallely
Courtesy: Dawn Interner
Edition, March 25, 2006
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) |