Posted on 03/17/2006 8:17:03 PM PST by Cornpone
Your morning cup of coffee, the watch on your wrist and the fantastic three-course meal you had last night are all part of Islam’s cultural legacy, according to an exhibition currently on in the UK.
‘1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage of Our World’, on at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester until June 4, charts one thousand years of Muslim contributions to medicine, science, education, architecture and astronomy.
Organisers, the Manchester-based Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, hopes the exhibition will show how hundreds of innovations now associated with the Western world owe their origins to Muslim scholarship and science.
“The extent to which Muslims have contributed to Western civilisation is not generally well-known. Yet scholars from the Islamic world gave us many of the everyday things we use today such as coffee, soap and clocks.
This exhibition shows that Muslims have always shared the heritage that provides a platform for developments that makes the Western world tick,” Professor Al-Hassani, who has led a five-year project to collate and validate the research behind the exhibition, said.
“A lot of these scientific and cultural developments are accepted as fact in academic circles, but the vast majority of people - because of the nature of the education system - are completely unaware of their origins,” Organisers want to challenge what they believe to be a widely-held belief that the Dark Ages was a period of stagnation and decline.
‘1001 Inventions’ presents evidence that the period, AD600 to AD1600 was a golden age for innovation, albeit in the Muslim world.
According to Professor Mark Halstead, a lecturer in moral education at Plymouth University, “Islam needs to take its place alongside other historic groups, such as the ancient Romans and Greeks.
When Europe was living in the dark ages, Islamic civilisation was blossoming, and the advances during this period are more relevant to the modern world than those of the Ancient Egyptians and Aztecs.”
Organisers say that ‘1001 Inventions’ is a non-religious and non-political project intended to create “an understanding of the interdependence of communities throughout human history”.
* TEN THINGS THE WEST OWES TO THE MUSLIMS
Adam Hart-Davisp, presenter of BBC Series ‘What the ancients did for us’ says that great ideas were overflowing during the Muslim middle ages “from al-Jazari and his elegant clocks and al-Kindi and Ibn al-Haitham with their revolutionary optical theories, experiments, and books, to the astronomers who navigated across the desert by the stars, and the map-makers who put north at the bottom.”
>> The musical notes we play on our recorder or piano are actually the Arabic alphabet read out aloud. The basic scale do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and ti comes from Arabic alphabet: Dal-Ra-Mim-Fa-Sad-Lam-Sin.
>> Chess was originally a Persian game with pieces including Shah as King.
>> A Ninth Century Muslim introduced the concept of the three-course meal to Europe.
>> Sherbet, a juice of crushed fruit, herbs, or flowers was the world’s first soft drink and was enjoyed by Western figures such as the 19th Century English poet Lord Byron.
>> Syrian Muslim and blind professor, Zain-Din al Amidi in the 14th Century improvised a method by which he identified his books and made notes - 600 years before braille was invented.
>> Unlike people in Medieval Europe, the Islamic world had a constant supply of fresh foods to eat throughout the year thanks to the development of crop rotation.
>> Apricots, oranges and artichokes were first introduced to Europe by the Muslims.
>> Cheese was first made in the Middle East. The earliest type was a form of sour milk.
One legend claims that cheese was ‘discovered’ by an Arab nomad who filled a saddlebag with milk to sustain him on a journey across the desert by horse. After several hours he stopped to drink, only to find that the milk had separated into a pale watery liquid and solid white lumps.
>> Tenth Century Muslim doctor Al-Zahrawi pioneered plastic surgery. And his practice of using ink to mark his incisions on the body is still a standard surgical procedure.
>> Al-Biruni, the 14th Century physicist was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth and its tilt 600 years before Galileo.
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You mean Muslims weren't completely worthless? Hey, how does that song go, What have you done for me lately?
It's a good question. The Arabs conquered a lot of high civilizations, and I suspect most of their achievements came from that. But in the course of time, all of those civilizations decayed under the influence of Islam and its corrupt and greedy rulers.
The Arabs killed the great civilization that ran across North Africa under the Carthaginians and the Romans. The Arabs killed the ancient civilization of Egypt. The Arabs killed the ancient Mesopotamian civilization. The Arabs killed the ancient Persian civilization. The Arabs killed the ancient Greek civilization, although that has come back.
Why does "Islam" get the credit for the inventions?
Was it always a case of: "On my way to the mosque just now, I had an idea...".
Roman dinners had many more courses, even feasts in the Dark Ages had more courses.
So, is it an really an invention to reduce the number?
I guess they would have claimed invention of the internet if Al Gore hadn't beat them to it.
Coming soon "Islamic History Month"!
>> They blowed up real good.
Who gives a damn?
I am still not impressed.
It seems everything mention can or was also discovered elsewhere.
Seems this is more a collection of prasing savages for not eating the laptop computer.
I do. They also invented the nuclear bomb...wait, that's next week...sorry.
I'll bet that many if not all of the others can be similarly discounted. Here's another one: if they had cheese years and years ago, why is there no "Arab" cheese on the menu today?
And worse, by Hindus in some cases. The zero, widely credited to the Arab Muslims, was actually invented by the Hindus of India, and stolen (well plagerized might be a better word) by the Muslims who had conquered them.
Jews were very prominent in intellectual circles in both the Ottoman Empire and Muslim Spain under the Moors. The latter was the path that the zero took to the rest of Europe.
Most of the great Arab achievements occurred in North Africa, before they became Muslim, and in Mesopotamia, also before old Mo's influence was felt there. There were also many Jews in Mesopotamia (todays Iraq, more or less). In fact there were quite a few up until the '67 Arab Israeli war, and more before the creation of the state of Israel.
and here's the link to the book by Rodney Stark (post 36)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400062284/qid=1142656415/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-5335977-2349406?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
What a load of BS. Islam has contributed NOTHING to the world. All those things were created by the civilizations they massacred. The Number system was invented by a East Indian Hindu for example. Muslims "claim" they invented it, but it's simply not true. History is being re- invented by Muslims, and nobody in the UK has the Nads to stand up and call them on this B.S.?
In fact,who knows what was LOST when the Muhammadans burned down the great libraries of cultures they destroyed, because anything not relevent to Islam was burned.
If it already exists in the Qur'an it is needless duplication. If it doesn't exist in the Qur'an it is apostacy and must be destroyed...we must have read the same books...before they were burned.
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