CAIRO, March 10, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) - The Islamic civilization has made an enormous but largely neglected contribution to the way people live in the west, Britain's the Guardian newspaper reported on Friday, March 10.
The "1001 Inventions:
Discover the Muslim Heritage of Our World"
exhibition, which opened in London on Wednesday, March 8, and runs through June, uncovers the Islamic civilization's overlooked contribution to science, technology and art during the dark ages in European history.
"It [the Islamic civilization] is the thread that links cars, carpets and cameras and is also responsible for three-course meals, bookshops and modern medicine," the paper commented.
The fair, supported by the Home Office and the Department for Trade and Industry, lifts the veil on hundreds of innovations - from kiosks and chess through to windmills and cryptography - that are often popularly associated with the western world but originate from Muslim scholarship and science.
Based on more than 3,000 peer-reviewed academic studies, the exhibition charts Islamic innovations during ten decades of "missing history" spanning from the 6th to the 16th century and covering an area stretching from China to southern Spain.
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Click to read the Guardian's article in full).