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.
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