Our history...wot we've invented around da wrld...jus click and find it out inshalah!

[Helena]

something interesting facts that we muslims created around the world....

How Islamic inventors changed the world
Source: The Independent

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

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.

so wot you all think inshalah?

[dostpost]

it is so interesting, thanks

[Helena]

it is so interesting, thanks

were u being sarcastic? 'its so interesting'.......lol....am only kidding....at least someone made a comment....

come on ppl..where eva u are hiding away from my posts.....

[jzcasejz]

Very Interrrrrresting Indeed

Great Post :brother:

[afriend]

MashAllah, this is a good article, I will be using some points in some work

JazkAllah Sister

[Pk_#2]

cool...never read all of it sowi sis...but i tried my best!!...it wasn't boring but i don't do long posts lol

The part i read was cool...amazing init

[Helena]

shukran for all comments......