Source: The Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article350594.ece
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
Published: 11 March 2006
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, 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 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 world 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 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. 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 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 -
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 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. The
scholar 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 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 Muslim 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 www.1001inventions.com.
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