[Threepwood]

"Al-Biruni, the 14th Century physicist was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth and its tilt 600 years before Galileo."

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure the Greeks had a good idea about the circumference of the Earth. I'll have to look it up.

[jscd3]

"Al-Biruni, the 14th Century physicist was able to calculate the circumference of the Earth and its tilt 600 years before Galileo."

This statement is silly at several levels. For example:

• Galileo lived in the 17th century. The 14th century is not 600 years before the 17th - unless Moslems also invented a new sort of math
• The use of Galileo's name is specious - it has never been suggested that he had anything to do with theorizing the world as round - which would be silly as well, since Magellan's expedition had already circumnavigated the globe
• The Greeks had already determined the earth to be spherical with a circumference of 25000 miles several centuries before Christ. Given Moslem conquests of the middle east and, therefore, access to this info, I wonder how original the 14th century discovery was?

Islamic civilization peaked centuries ago - and was built almost entirely on the back of conquered Christian, Jewish, and Hindu civilization and discoveries. It is no real shock that when the Turkish empire reached it's limit of conquest, it also stopped creating new technolgy, techniques, and treasure - it had no one else to obtain these from.

By the way, claiming all sorts of "inventions" for "Islam" is nothing new - do some Google searches and you'll find that Moslem historians also teach that all of Columbus's ship captains were Moslem, and that Moslems were exploring the Mississippi river centuries before anyone else. I swear, it reminds me of the old days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union used to teach that Russians had discovered everything from the airplane to the electric light bulb, or the 80's fad of African Historical Revisionism, which insisted that Cleopatra was Black, and taught inner city kids stories about Egyptions (who, of course, the inner city kids were decended from) using gliders 3000 years ago (Note - I'm not kidding).

[Psycho_Bunny]

One of the librarians of Alexandria - I can never remember his name - had calculated the circumference of the earth within something like 30 miles long before the muslims crashed into the world.

Many of these bullet points are blatant distortions and lies.

Chess invented by the Persians?  How's that a muslim contribution? That's a Zarathustrian contribution, if one wants to qualify it in religious terms.

How's the spread of a local fruit and vegetable a "contribution"? 

muslims did not invent crop rotation.

This is mostly BS.

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

I know that a Greek calculated the distance to the sun in the 1st centry. The angle of shadows down wells in Antioch and Alexadria were taken at noon on the same day. Since they had the distance between the cities, they use the angle to calculate the distance to the sun, and were correct within approximately 5%. Not bad.