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The Islamic Bulletin
Volume X No. 23
Page 24
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.
(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. Muslim
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 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.
(12) 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.
(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 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.
(15) 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).
(16) Carpets were regarded as part of paradise by mediaeval
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-
representational 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.
(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 China
drawn on his bank in Baghdad.
(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. Al-Idrisi took a globe
depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.
(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) Mediaeval 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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