1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid
was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern
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
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
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
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
9 The pointed arch so characteristic of
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
12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and
brought to Europe from
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
15 Ali ibn Nafi,
known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came from
16 Carpets were regarded as part of
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
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
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