1000 Years of Muslim Science

The Qur'an calls upon Muslims to look around them and study the physical world, so that they might appreciate the majesty of Allah's creation. "Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the benefit of mankind; in the rain which Allah Sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth -- (Here) indeed are Signs for a people that are wise." (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:164)

Muslim science gave us our number system; built the first university; introduced the use of zero in mathematics; and provided us with a huge array of words, from giraffe to crimson and from traffic to cheque. For a millennium they chronicled the work of the ancient Greeks, Indians and Chinese while developing their own expertise in surgery, water and wind power, optics, agriculture and other subjects. While Europe shivered in the dark ages, the Arab world kept scholarship alive.

I completely agree that Muslim contributions are never taught and it is always made out like the West suddenly discovered everything and had the greatest scientists and academics yet Muslims were the pioneers of a great civilisation while the Western world was in the dark ages.

While I was doing my psychology degree I didnt even know that the first psychiatric institutions ever built and research being carried out was in Muslim Spain while the rest of the world still believed ignorantly that mental illness was being 'inhabited by evil spirits'.

Of course after Muslims were butchered by outside forces and invaded much of these libraries of research were burnt down with thousands of books lost. One should read up on the Muslim empires. It is quite revealing.

Many of these "inventions" came from the countries muslims conquered.

Just one point as I can't be bothered contradicting a lot of the so called 'muslim' science, much of which was garnered from the inhabitants of the countries they had conquered and the 'inventors' who had converted to Islam.

Numbers - yes the Arabs gave written numbers and names to the numeric system but it certainly did not invent it. The zero was invented by the Hindus, the Chinese had been using numbers for centuries as had the Romans.

As for architecture - much of that was pinched from Persia and Spain and the Byzantine Christian countries which the muslims had conquered - I mean, Arabia wasn't exactly a land of palaces and learning, it was only when they moved to the more literate and functional countries that they did set up universities etc. for the more learned indigenous people. But without the input of the more educated middle eastern countries and Mediterraneant lands that they had captured this would not have happened.

But there we go - the London Science Museum pandering to the muslims again, fortunately many of us know where the brains of the Islamic world were. But then, because muslims are not well educated in their history they will actually believe they "invented" many of these things.