In this brief statement, Professor Jim Al-Khalili outlines some ideas about intercultural dialogue from the standpoint of science exchange between the West and the Islamic world. Departing from his experience as expert in science communication, he presents a short history of the British Science Association and highlights the tight links of collaboration this institution holds with the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC).
Aiming at restoring historical continuity to the currently available knowledge on medicine in the Middle Ages, the article summarizes some results from Prof. Abdel-Halim's extensive primary-source studies of the original Arabic works of ten medieval Islamic medical scholars who lived and practiced between the 9th and 13th centuries and whose works represented original contributions to the progress of anatomy, physiology, clinical medicine and surgery. The article also highlights the importance of continuing research in this field, for the reason that the investigation about the transmission and translation movements that occurred during the Middle Ages are bound to emphasize the universality of knowledge and unity of mankind. Such an assumption will certainly boost cultural inter-appreciation around the world and help to strengthen mutual understandings between the West and the East and, thus, nurture the interaction between different faiths and various civilisations.
The Islamic realms served as a crucible for scientific learning from the ancient Greek world in the West and from China, India and Iran, in the East. Western Europe in turn benefited from the transmission of Arabic science into Latin, just as Chinese culture was indebted to Arabic texts travelling eastwards. There was a vast network of transmission over centuries and over continents. This short article presents three stories telling related to the transfer of science between India, Europe and China via Muslim Heritage.
The following article presents a brief status about the transmission of Muslim scientific texts, and how the physical means by which it was done may have affected their reception and influence in both the Muslim world and Europe. The article documents in particular the traces of existence of printing in early Islam, several centuries before the invention of printing by Gutenberg in the 15th century.
In this short note, Dr Zohor Idrisi, an expert on the history of Islamic agriculture, explores the interaction between some folk astronomical knowledge and the agricultural practice in Islamic civilisations. Taking examples from the al-anwa' literature, she focuses on the famous Calendar of Cordoba written in 961 CE under the title Kitab al Anwa' and translated into Latin as Liber anoe.
Islamic architecture encompasses a wide range of both secular and religious styles from the foundation of Islam to the present day, influencing the design and construction of buildings and structures in Islamic culture and beyond. The principal Islamic architectural types are: the Mosque, the Tomb, the Palace, the Fort, the School, and urban buildings. For all these types of constructions, Islamic architecture developed a rich vocabulary that was also used for buildings of lesser importance such as public baths, fountains and domestic architecture. The following article, recalling salient aspects of the rich tradition of Islamic architecture, provides a brief discussion on the concept of Islamic architecture and reviews a number of its key theoretical issues circulating in the Western academic circles.
On 2nd June 2010, Professor Salim Al-Hassani lectured in Bristol, UK, on 1001 inventions: Cultural Routes of Science for Cultural Inter-Appreciation. This lecture was organised by the British Science Association (Bristol and Bath branch) and the St Mary Redcliffe Journey into Science project. The venue was St Mary Redcliffe Church, a fascinating monument with numerous features of the medieval Islamic architecture. The lecture was attended by a large audience.
Cash endowments contributed to Ottoman society, without any cost to the State, by organizing and financing expenditures on education, health, welfare and a host of other activities. The aim of this article is to discover how these endowments functioned and contributed to the society over the long term. For this purpose the Cash Waqf Census Registers of the city of Bursa covering the period 1555-1823 were analysed in this article. Thus, although limited to one Ottoman city, a long-term analysis covering almost three hundred years has been attempted for the first time. This article analyses the way these endowments functioned and contributed to the society over a long period of time covering almost three hundred years.
The Muslim carpet has long been a luxury commodity sought by textile museums, rich collectors and wealthy merchants all over the world. The fame of the flying carpet of 'Al'a Al-Din (Aladdin) added some emotional mystery and value to its already exceptional beauty and tangible quality. It is not surprising that carpets still represent one of the most valuable art items obtained by museums and wealthy families. Furthermore, carpeting is becoming one of the essential ingredients of today's living standard in the modern world. Modern sophisticated manufacturing has made it one of the cheapest available flooring methods, whilst its comfort and warmth has increased its popularity becoming the largest used flooring system replacing the ceramics and mosaics. What are the origins of this tradition? What is the Muslim contribution to the history of the carpet industry? In the following article, a brief account provides a historical background to the appearance and development of Muslim carpet making; then light is shed on its transfer to the West so gradually setting up a western carpeting tradition.
While there are numerous works on the role of Muslim women in jurisprudence (fiqh) and literature and there are also studies on Muslim women in education and in medicine- although on a much smaller scale-, few sources mention the role of Muslim women in the development of science and technology. There are isolated references that mention some of the famous women who had a role in advancing science and who established charitable, educational and religious institutions. Some examples are: Zubayda who pioneered a most ambitious project of digging wells and building service stations all along the pilgrimage route from Baghdad to Mecca, Sutayta who was a mathematician and an expert witness in courts, Dhayfa Khatun who excelled in management and statesmanship, Fatima al-Fehri who founded the Qarawiyin mosque and university in Fez, and the astrolabe maker Al-'Ijliya, the rulers and queens Sitt al-Mulk, Shajarat al-Durr, Raziya of Delhi, and Amina of Zaria. In view of the growing importance of the subject of gender and women in society, this report presents what is currently known about some famous Muslim women, in the hope of initiating debate and starting the process of unearthing what could be a most significant find.
The 14th-century historiographer and historian Abu Zayd ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun was a brilliant scholar and thinker now viewed as a founder of modern historiography, sociology and economics. Living in one of human kind's most turbulent centuries, he observed at first hand, or participated in, such decisive events as the birth of new states, the disintegration of the Muslim Andalus and the advance of the Christian reconquest, the Hundred Years' War, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the decline of Byzantium and the epidemic of the Black Death. Considered by modern critics as the thinker that conceived and created a philosophy of history that was undoubtedly one of the greatests works ever created by a man of intelligence, so groundbreaking were his ideas, and so far ahead of his time, that his writings are taken as a lens through which to view not only his own time but the relations between Europe and the Muslim world in our own time as well.
The Islamic tradition of agriculture, whether in the form of the outstanding progress in agriculture production or as a large corpus of farming manuals written in Arabic, is nowadays a subject of interest for historians of science and of economic and social history. The following article, translated from Arabic, by Dr. Jaser Abu Safieh describes some salient aspects of this tradition and shows how it intertwined with Islamic culture and the various forms of Islamic learning. Focusing on its achievements as a revolution in production of agricultural products, the article shows also the various aspects of the interest in plants taken in Islamic history: the linguistic aspect, the use of herbs and plants products in medicine and the development of agriculture science properly.
The contributions of Ibn Khaldun to the development of economic thought have gone largely unnoticed in the academic realm of Western nations, this despite recent research focusing on Khaldun's magnum opus, The Muqaddimah. In this paper, we examine the similarities between The Muqaddimah and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, particularly as they discuss the benefits of a system of specialization and trade and the role of markets and price systems.
Ibn Khaldun's theory of taxation has been considered one of his most important contributions to economic thought. In the Muqaddimah, he relates the theory of taxation with the government expenditure and argued for low tax rate so that incentive to work is not killed and taxes are paid happily. According to him, at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessment, but at the end of a dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessment. The effect of taxation on incentives and productivity is so clearly visualized by Ibn Khaldun that he seems to have grasped the concept of optimum taxation. He also analyzed the effect of government expenditure on the economy. He advocates a policy of wise and productive public expenditure. By these economic insights, Ibn Khaldun has been considered as the forerunner of modern recommendations that high tax rates shrink the tax base because they reduce the economic activity. The present paper aims at an analytical study of this theory by presenting empirical evidence that may support and strengthen the Khaldunian theory of taxation and examines its practicality and relevance today.
The economic theory of Ibn Khaldun and the rise and fall of nations, Selim Cafer Karatas, Ibn Khaldun on economics, the state theory, specialisation and economic surplus, supply and demand, monetary policy, fixed prices, property rights, Ibn Khaldun's theory of the rise and fall of nations.
This paper describes the results of a novel research on the Muslim influence on the European culinary art during the Renaissance. Presenting evidence of how this influence entered the aristocratic circles in Europe, it draws attention to the way in which it shaped the use and trade of spices.
The Islamic civilisation allowed the development of autonomous norms of beauty that were inspired by the faith of Islam. The Islamic artistic tradition viewed the beauty of the universe, emphasized in the Quran, and the literary qualities of the Quranic text itself, as compelling evidence for the divine hand. In this fascinating article, HRH Princess Wijdan Ali investigates the unique philosophy that underpins and guides Islamic art and the Muslim artist-artisan and developed the elements of a real and original philosophy of art, beauty and aesthetics in the Islamic culture.
The following essay aims to alert communities as to the particular significance of the Muslim civilisation and its historical role in contributing to the birth of modern civilisation. The author, Professor Salim Al-Hassani, a specialist of Muslim Heritage and a pioneer of its defense, focuses first on various instances of distorted history in scholarship, school curricula and media culture. He shows how unjustified is the suppression of centuries of history from history books and how the jump from Hellenistic times to Renaissance is rather the manifestation of ignorance and misconceptions. Presenting selected examples, he then proves that this suppressed period, belonging to the classical period of the history of Islam, and which lasted for about a millennium, knew a creative contribution to civilisation by men and women of different faiths. Those knowledge, science and art creators built on ancient knowledge and were the drive of one of the richest periods of history in terms of science, culture, technology and art.
The English aristocrat and writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is today remembered particularly for her letters from Turkey, an early example of a secular work by a Western woman about the Muslim Orient. When Lady Mary was in the Ottoman Empire, she discovered the local practice of variolation, the inoculation against smallpox. Unlike Jenner's later vaccination, which used cowpox, variolation used a small measure of smallpox itself. Lady Mary, who had suffered from the disease, encouraged her own children to be inoculated while in Turkey. On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure, but encountered a great deal of resistance. However, her example certainly popularized the practice of inoculation with smallpox in British high society. The numbers inoculated remained small, and medical effort throughout the 18th century was concentrated on reducing the risks and side-effects of the inoculation process.
Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas Al-Zahrawi (936-1013 CE), also known in the West as Albucasis, was an Andalusian physician. He is considered as the greatest surgeon in the Islamic medical tradition. His comprehensive medical texts, combining Middle Eastern and Greco-Roman classical teachings, shaped European surgical procedures up until the Renaissance. His greatest contribution to history is Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume collection of medical practice, of which large portions were translated into Latin and in other European languages.
One area where the genius of the Muslim civilisation has been recognised worldwide is that of art. The artists of the Islamic world adapted their creativity to evoke their inner beliefs in a series of abstract forms, producing some amazing works of art. Rejecting the depiction of living forms, these artists progressively established a new style substantially deviating from the Roman and Byzantine art of their time. In the mind of these artists, works of art are very much connected to ways of transmitting the message of Islam rather than the material form used in other cultures. This article briefly examines the meaning and character of art in Islamic culture and explores its main decorative forms-floral, geometrical, and calligraphic. Finally, it looks at the influence of the art developed in the world of Islam on the art of other cultures, particularly that of Europe.
In a programme broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday 14 February 2010, the work and influence of the great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan was highlighted, through the description of his magnificent buildings in Istanbul and its influence on Italian Renaissance architecture. We here present a link to this programme for online listening, with further resources.
Recent scholarly interest in the genesis of social sciences in Islamic culture is a noteworthy shift. Until recent times, the development of these fields was credited exclusively to the modern Western tradition, especially to the 19th century birth of humanities. The ground breaking contribution of Ibn Khaldun was recognized; however, the author of the Muqaddima stands as an isolated genius. In the following article, an attempt is made to broaden the field by highlighting the contributions of several other scholars in laying the foundation of social sciences in Islamic culture. After a short survey on Al-Biruni and Al-Raghib al-Isfahani, the focus of the article is dedicated to the 10th-century Palestinian geographer Al-Muqaddasi, who touched on various subjects of interest to the social sciences in his book Ahsan al-taqasim fi ma'rifat al-aqalim.
Piri Reis is a well known Ottoman-Turkish admiral, geographer and cartographer from the 16th century. His famous world map compiled in 1513 and discovered in 1929 at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul is the oldest known Turkish map showing the New World, and one of the oldest maps of America still in existence. The half of the map which survives shows the western coasts of Europe and North Africa and the coast of Brazil with reasonable accuracy in addition to various Atlantic islands including the Azores and Canary Islands. This article presents the achievements of Piri Reis in cartography through the analysis of the surviving partial versions of his two world maps and his book of navigation, the Kitab-i Bahriye.
In this article we will be looking at several handbooks on archery written in both the Islamic world and in the West with the aim of determining which is the oldest useful manual on archery. Our investigation is guided with criteria in function of which materials were selected, such as availability of the text, the existence of an English version (original or in translation) and its comprehensiveness in covering archery techniques. On the basis of these criteria, it turned out that the oldest useful manual on archery is a book written around 1368 by Taybugha Al-Ashrafi Al-Baklamishi Al-Yunani, The Complete Manual of Archery for Cadets, known in the scholarship as Saracen Archery.
The period from the 9th century to the 13th century witnessed a fundamental transformation in agriculture that can be characterized as the Islamic green revolution in pre-modern times. The economy established in the Arab and Islamic world enabled the diffusion of many crops and farming techniques as well as the adaptation of crops and techniques from and to regions beyond the Islamic world. These introductions, along with an increased mechanization of agriculture, led to major changes in economy, population distribution, vegetation cover, agricultural production and income, population levels, urban growth, the distribution of the labour force, linked industries, cooking, diet and clothing in the Islamic world. This article presents a survey on those issues and others, such as agricultural machinery water Management and farming manuals.
Dams are required in most hydraulic systems, for irrigation, regulating flow of rivers and in modern times for the production of energy. In the classical Islamic world, dam construction received a special attention as an integral part of large civil engineering works. Since the Umayyad Caliphate, dams were built in different Islamic regions. This article is a survey presenting the tradition of dam construction by Muslims, characterized by a rich variety of structures and forms.
The modern astronomical observatory as a research institute (as opposed to a private observation post as was the case in ancient times) is a creation of the Islamic scientific tradition. Since the early 9th century, the astronomers of Islamic lands worked in astronomical observtories in which they performed precise observations of the skies and produced accurate astronomical tables. The Islamic observatory was a dynamic scientific specialized institution with its own scientific staff, director, astronomical program, large astronomical instruments and building. Islamic observatories were also the earliest institutions to emphasize group research and in them theoretical investigations went hand in hand with observations.
From the beginning of the Islamic history, the scholars developed the Islamic hijri calendar as a lunar calendar designed to organize timekeeping for religious and social needs. The development of the Islamic calendar and the different tasks related to it played a leading role in the advance of Arabic astronomy as an applied and theoretical science. The following article presents a survey on the Islamic hijri calendar and the varieties of timekeeping devices related to it. A special concern is devoted to the Ottoman contributions in this field.
The history of the astrolabe begins more than two thousand years ago, but it is in the Islamic classical world that the astrolabe was highly developed and its uses widely multiplied. Introduced to Europe from Islamic Spain in the early 12th century, it was one of the major astronomical instruments until the modern times. In this concise and beautifully illustrated article, Emily Winterburn casts a short story of the Islamic art of making astrolabes – developing the different varieties, the description of their structure and parts and their uses in social, religious and scientific functions.
In the following essay, Dr. Gunalan Nadarajan, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State University, draws on the work of al-Jazari, the famous 13th century Islamic scholar, engineer and scientist, to develop an alternative history of robotics. The work of Al-Jazari is considered as a significant contribution to the history of robotics and automation insofar as it enables a critical re-evaluation of classical notions and the conventional history of automation and therefore of robotics. In his analysis, the author details the notion of "Islamic automation", where the notions of control that have informed the conventional history of automation and robotics are substituted by subordination and submission to the rhythms of the machines.
During the period of Islamic-Arabic extraordinary activity in Science and Technology (9th-13th century), there are some recorded contributions to the area of Automatic Control mainly in the development of water clocks using float valve regulators, different level controls using float valves or combination of syphons and the development of On-Off control. In this short survey, Professor Dr Mohamed Mansour, former Professor of Control Engineering At ETH Zürich surveys the subject by investigating the words of Banu Musa, Al-Muradi, Ridhwan al-Sa'ati and Al-Jazari.
Among the original machines described in the corpus of Islamic technology, the six-cylinder "monobloc" piston pump designed by Taqi al-Din Ibn Ma'ruf in the late 16th century holds a special place. Working as a suction pump, this complex machine included components that are often associated with modern technology, such as a camshaft, a cylinder block, pistons, and non-return valves. In this article, Joseph Vera, an expert in re-engineering ancient inventions, describes how he created a SolidWorks CAD model of this remarkable pump, that he completed with a motion simulation. The conclusion he drew after creating the model and the simulation is that the engineers of the Islamic tradition, represented by Taqi al-Din, had a very solid grasp of kinematics, dynamics and fluid mechanics. He notes also that Taqi al-Din's "monobloc" pump is a remarkable example of a machine using renewable energy, a topic that is currently of utmost importance.
The complex of disciplines composed of mathematics, architecture and art in Islamic civilisation has been an important field of recent research. The scholars showed the interaction between mathematical reflexion and procedures and their implementation in designing concrete and symbolic forms in buildings, decoration and design. Furthermore, recent scholarship pointed out the amazing progress that this marriage brought about in prefiguring outstanding mathematical results that scientists proved only in late 20th century. In the following survey, Professor Salim Al-Hassani explores the various facets of this exciting subject that is still full of discoveries to come. By drawing attention to the ongoing debates in scholarly circles among physicicts, mathematicians and historians of science, art and architecture, he shows how the connection between theoretical and applied mathematics was fruitful and creative in the Islamic tradition.
The scholars of Islamic culture worked extensively in the combined fields of botany, herbals and healing. Several scholars contributed to the knowledge of plants, their diseases and the methods of growth. They classified plants into those that grow from cuttings, those that grow from seed and those that grow spontaneously. Great Muslim figures such as Al-Dinawari, Ibn Juljul and Ibn al-Baytar made great progress in the field, as this article demonstrates. Muslim botanists knew how to produce new fruits by grafting; they combined the rose bush and the almond tree to generate rare and lovely flowers. The royal botanical gardens contained an endless variety of plants, indigenous and exotic, cultivated for their brilliant foliage, their delightful fragrance, or their culinary and medicinal virtues. In particular, they dealt with plants in a variety of ways, which included their study from a philological perspective, but most importantly for their curative and healing properties.
Most educational systems, particularly those of Western countries, teach that industry was born in Europe and that the Industrial Revolution was the mother that delivered industrial mass production. Salim Al-Hassani, Chairman of FSTC and eminent expert in Islamic science and Muslim Heritage at large, challenges this view and presents an overview of the industrial and engineering processes which preceded the Industrial Revolution. Examining briefly the vast industry which stretched from China to Spain during the Muslim Civilisation (eighth-seventeenth centuries), he presents an overview of some randomly selected aspects of Muslim industrial production which highlights not only the Islamic antecedents of many processes and products widespread in our modern industrial system, but also how erroneous is the opinion that industrial production was alien to Islamic society.
Al-Azhar is today the most important religious university in the Muslim world with over 90,000 students studying there at any one time. It is arguably the oldest university in the world (disputed only by the Qarrawiyyin Mosque in Fez, Morroco ).
What
is Taught
Sir William Harvey is wrongly credited with the modern theory of Pulmonary Circulation. Ibn Al-Nafis, an Arab physician of the 13th Century, explained the basic principles of Pulmonary Circulation nearly 350 years before Harvey was born.
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