From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we in the West take for granted. Here are some of their most influential innovations:
(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 some Muslims drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Makkah 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, 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 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 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 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206) 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.
However, 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. The architect of Henry V’s castle was a Muslim.
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 5th century man’s concern was primarily focused upon security and stability, whilst art and science were neglected. For two hundred years all progress stagnated in the wake of barbarian invasions and the resulting lack of maintenance of public works, such as dams, aqueducts and bridges. With the advent of Islam in the 7th century a new type of society emerged, which quickly established its supremacy and its constructive identity in large sections of the known world. The citizen, whether Muslim or not, soon became confident in the future stability of his environment, so that trade not only reached its previous levels but also began to expand.
In an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to India, security of communications was vital. The resultant priority given to safety of travel provided a stimulus to trade. There followed a rapid expansion of commerce in which the economic strengths of the Sassanid[1], Byzantine, Syrian and western Mediterranean areas were united. The establishment of an efficient fiscal system meant that the state could now invest in large public works projects: mosques, schools (madrasas), public baths, palaces, markets and hospitals. Princes and merchants became patrons of intellectual and scientific development. Trusts (waqf) were created to provide better education.
This sponsorship engendered a creative enthusiasm and a flowering of scientific works and scholarly research. The world in effect became greater as mathematicians, geographers, astronomers and philosophers all contributed to a gradual but definite extension of the horizons of man’s existence. The dividend of all this expenditure on learning made an immense contribution to the sum of the increase in man’s scientific knowledge that occurred between the 9th and the 16th centuries.
Foremost in the achievements of Muslim scholars was the treatment of numbers. It is impossible to conceive how science could have advanced without a sensible logical numeric system to replace the clumsy numerals of the Roman Empire. Fortunately, by the 9th century the Muslim world was using the Arabic system of numerals with the essential addition of the zero. Without the latter, it was impossible to know what power of ten accompanied each digit. Hence 2 3 might mean 23, 230 or 203. The introduction of this numeric system with its zero was thus the ‘sesame’ of scientific advancement.
The new numeric system did not only affect science. Its value was manifest in many aspects of daily life, from the calculation of customs dues, taxes, almsgiving (zakat) and transport charges, to the complexity of divisions of inheritance. A further useful innovation was the mine of separation in fractions, which eliminated many frustrating confusions.
Islamic civilization produced from roughly 750 CE to 1450 CE a succession of scientists, astronomers, geographers and mathematicians from the inventor of Algebra to the discoverer of the solution of quadratic equations[2]. The list is far reaching, some are well known whilst others remain anonymous. One of the major advances was contained in the work of Al-Khawarizmi[3], who wrote a mathematical work called “Al-Jabr wa Al-Muqabala” (820 CE)[4], from whose title is derived the name “algebra”, this book may be considered the first book written on the topic of algebra. Amongst the achievements that Al Khawarizmi left to posterity were: (1) Solutions to first and second-degree equations with a single unknown, using both algebraic and geometric methods. (2) A method of algebraic multiplication and division.
Al Khawarizmi[5] defined three kinds of quantities: (1) Simple numbers, such as 5, 17 and 131. (2) The root which is the unknown quantity ‘shay’ in Arabic meaning “a thing” However, in translations made in Toledo, (the centre for translation of Arabic books), the absence of a “sh” sound in the Spanish language meant that a suitable letter had to be chosen. The choice fell upon “x”, which may well explain why Don Quixote is often pronounced as “Don Quishote”. (3) “Wealth” (mal) the square of the root (x²).
The algebraic equation expressing the Golden Ratio could therefore be written as: “x:y = (x + y)/x”. Another virtuoso of algebra was Abu Kamil, a 10th century mathematician nicknamed the “Egyptian calculator”. He was capable of rationalizing denominators in expressions that involved dealing with powers of x (the unknown) as high as the eighth and solving quadratic equations with irrational numbers as coefficients. Al Biruni (9th/10th centuries) mathematician and physicist, worked out that the earth rotates on its own axis and succeeded in calculating its circumference. Abu Bakr Al Karaji (10th century) is known for his arithmetization of algebra[6]. He also drew the attention of the Muslim world to the intriguing properties of triangular arrays of numbers (Berggren 1983). Al Nasawi (10th century) and Kushyar Ibn Labban worked on problems of the multiplication of two decimals. Subsequently Kushyar explained the arithmetic of decimal addition, subtraction and multiplication and also how to calculate square roots. Abu Al Hassan al Uqlidisi (Damascus 10th century) invented decimal fractions, which proved useful for judges (qadis) in inheritance decisions. Al Karkhi (d.1019) found rational solutions to certain equations of a degree higher than two.
Mohamed Al Battani[7] (Baghdad 10th century), mathematician and astronomer, computed sine, tangent and cotangent tables from 0° to 90° with great accuracy. One of his works: Astronomical Treatise and Tables (Al-Zij), corrected Ptolemy’s observations on the motion of the planets. Al Samaw’al Ben Yahya al Maghribi (1171) drew up charts of computations of long division of polynomials; one of the best contributions to the history of mathematics. Ibn Shatir Al Muwaqqit (Damascus 1375 CE) was an astronomer and the timekeeper of the Damascus mosque. His treatise on making astronomical devices and their usage and his book on celestial motions bear great resemblance to the works of Copernicus (1473-1543 CE). Ghiyat al Din al Kashi (1427 CE) raised computational mathematics to new heights with the extraction of fifth roots. He also showed how to express the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius as 6.2831853071795865, identical to the modern formula 2pr.
