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Muslim Scientists
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Muslim Inventions
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Paul Vallely admires the Muslim Scientists
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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.
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Coffee
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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.
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Pin Hole Camera
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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.
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Chess
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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.
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Parachute
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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.
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Shampoo
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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.
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Refinement & Distillation
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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.
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Crank Shaft
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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.
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Metal Armour
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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.
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Pointed Arch
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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.
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Surgical Instruments
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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.
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Windmill
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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.
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Vaccination
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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.
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Fountain Pen
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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.
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Numerals
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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.
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Soup
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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).
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Carpets
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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-representationa l 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.
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Bank Cheques
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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.
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Earth in a Sphere Shape
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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.
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Rocket & Torpedo
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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.
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Gardens
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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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