1,001 inventions mark Islam’s role in science
This is a jolly little puff piece which is not typical of the Scotsman, however the comments are worthy of note.
The account of Khalid’s discovery (of coffee, or coffee eating goats) is just one of a glittering treasury of untold tales from a golden age of discovery and innovation, which took place in the Islamic world between the seventh and 17th centuries.
It is this hidden history that a new exhibition aims to unveil. Entitled 1,001 Inventions, the exhibition opens at Glasgow Science Centre later this month and charts the innovations of exceptional scholars, and ordinary people, from the Islamic world who discovered and developed many items that are taken for granted today. The exhibits are divided into seven zones: home, hospital, market, school, town, universe and world.
Professor Salim Al-Hassani, chairman of the Foundation for Science Technology and Civilisation, creators of 1,001 Inventions, said there is a widespread misconception that science and technology withered during the “Dark Ages”.
“The 1,001 Inventions exhibition aims, through a process of education and learning, to challenge this myth and celebrate the fact that Muslim civilisation was flourishing and contributed to the advancement of our society today,” he said.
Religion of Inventions
The comments:-
* Didn’t they also invent the process where they convince their uneducated children to blow themselves up so as to kill and main innocent people?
* Any news of any inventions made in the last 300 years?
* We write with Roman letters but use Arabic numerals so the influence extends to something as basic as 1,2,3″ And they pinched the idea from India.
* Most of this stuff attributed to Muslim scientists is just a rehash of stuff they got from the Greeks.
* Eratosthenes who died in 194BC not only knew the earth was spherical but measured its circumference-which puts him 13 centuries ahead of al-Idrisi.
* Al-Battani popularised trigonometry did he? Obviously he then knew the work of Pythagoras , a Greek who died around 500 BC.
* Number theory was greatly advanced by the ‘discovery’ of the number zero. A concept which the Muslims stole from the Hindus when they dropped in to ravage and rob India.
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* This is a nice try at a puff piece but you’ll have to do better than this.
So we owe the muslim’s for civilization?
Let’s see: stealing, reprinting and renaming, acquiring without permission and claiming invention, etc. A wonderful culture… current behavior bombs for children and woman, beheading girls for going to school, yes a peaceful, loving culture, interested in human advancement. May history return them to where they came from…MRD
* Muslims are particularly zealous in their steady exaggeration of supposedly Muslim inventions and advancements. The Hindu “zero” which was transmitted to the Islamic world, just as paper-making (see Dard Hunter) came to Damascus from China, has long been claimed for the Arabs and Islam. Similarly, the most famous Arabic-using mathematician, the polymath Al-Khwarizmi, is put forth as some kind of representative for Islam, when his own history suggests a lone and unorthodox wolf, in the tradition of al-Rhazi.
My own thought it that once one has thrown out all those who, though they are known by their Arabic names, were in fact Christians or Jews, and once one has determined that the Muslim figures who remain were only one or two or at most three generations away from their non-Muslim ancestors, one begins to suspect that “Islamic” science disappeared because the non-Muslims ceased to be an important part of the population, had been sufficiently reduced in numbers or otherwise marginalized so that the spirit of Islam — a spirit most inimical to free and skeptical inquiry about everything, including what Newton and other scientists in Christendom saw as the laws of Nature that could be determined, for God himself had set the clockwork mechanism in motion, and Man could determine the laws according to which that mechanism functioned, while in Islam, Allah obeys no laws, but is whimsical, does just what he likes, and submissive man must be a slave to Allah, and question nothing, wonder quizzically about nothing, investigate nothing, for Allah knows best. People raised to believe that kind of thing, existing in societies where everyone believes or must pretend to believe that kind of thing, may manage to engage in that bastard-child of science called weapons technology, but that is acceptable because those weapons will help Islam to overcome the Infidels What is inadmissible is for Muslims to study the nature of DNA, or subatomic particles. Some born into Islam may do so — but in so doing, they are showing that they are not true Believers.
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* Even if one were to concede Islam’s “past glory days and contributions” to Western civilization, how do they in the same breath explain the failure of so many Islamic states today? How can it be that the West benefit so much from Islam and yet simultaneously Islam not benefit from itself? Blaming colonialism only highlights Islam’s inability and impotence to deal with adversity (something all Muslims would be loathe to admit of their “perfect” religion).
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What happened to BLiar?
“There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone.
Tony Blair: Iran extremism like rise of 1930s fascism
“I fear this is mistaken. They have no intention of leaving us alone.
“They have made their choice and leave us with only one to make – to be forced into retreat or to exhibit even greater determination and belief in standing up for our values than they do in standing up for their’s.”
Mr Blair, who represents the Quartet of the US, Europe, Russia and the United Nations on the Middle East, was speaking at the 62nd annual Alfred E Smith Memorial Foundation dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.
Mr Blair went on: “I said straight after the attack of September 2001 that this was not an attack on America but on all of us. That Britain’s duty was to be shoulder to shoulder with you in confronting it. I meant it then and I mean it now.”
He added: “America and Europe should not be divided, we should stand up together.
“The values we share are as vital and true and, above all, needed today as they have been at any time in the last 100 years.”
Mr Blair received three standing ovations during the evening.
* Hmm. should we be impressed?
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Muslims launch dialogue meetings with UK political leaders
“The purpose of the discussions is to encourage the young Muslims to engage in dialogue with the politicians,” Muslim News editor Ahmed Versi said.
Initial discussions focused on Britain’s controversial anti-terrorism laws, its impact on the Muslim communities, police stop and search powers, radicalization and the increase in holding suspects in detention without any charge.
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