Forgotten Brilliance
The eastern world has been in many ways vilified and demonized, through popular cinema and various other mediums. We have lost sight of the fact that from the east we have been given many gifts of knowledge, culture and language. Yet, it is easy to only recall violence, terrorism and chaos when thinking of the east. In this humble post, I list all the things we, in modern times and nations, have inherited from the east, to be exact the often criminalized “Middle East.”
Algebra: comes from the Arabic word, Al- Jabr and is traced back to the Babylonians, or better yet, Iraqi’s.
Cotton: the word cotton in English and Spanish, actually comes from the Arabic word Algodon
Aorta, alcohol, chemistry, earth and alkaline also come from the Arabic language and culture.
Astronomy was a subject of particular importance to Islamic scientific study. The Qu’ran advised Muslims to use the stars as a way of learning and glorfying God. The studying of eclipses, natural phenomenon and astronomical study by Muslims in the Golden Age of the 8th to 17th century, is still used in Europe and beyond.
The Qu’ran encouraged empirical observation and reason, the exploration of medicine and progressive methods of remedying illnesses. This, in turn, made way for much research in the area of medicine by Islamic scholars and doctors.
610-632, Muslim scholars and doctors were made aware of and began learning about leprosy, mange, sexually transmitted diseases, and other contagion. An Islamic calendar was also invented at the same time.
634-644 the windmill was invented in Afghanistan
In the 700s the brass astrolabe was developed by Muhammad al-Fazari, at the same time tin-opacified glazing in pottery was developed in Basra, Iraq.
The first milling factory was built in Baghdad in the 900s
Graph paper and the cartographic grid was invented in Baghdad in the 900s
900s – Muslim astronomers also invent the “almucantar quadrant navigational astrolabe vertical sundial, and polar sundial.”
900s – Shaving soap is invented by Arabic chemists.
900s – Alcohol is first employed for medical uses by Arabic physicians. They were the first in the world to use the method of distillation. The world alcohol comes from the Arabic word meaning “finely divided” referring to the distillation process.
800 – 1000 – Muslim engineers invented a variety of surveying instruments for accurate levelling, used for alignment, measuring angles, triangulation, finding the width of a river, and the “distance between two points separated by an impassable obstruction.”
Many medical institutions incorrectly believed by the masses to have been developed in the west, trace their origins in the medieval Islamic world: public hospital, psychiatric hospital, the public library, the “academic degree-granting” university and the “astronomical observatory as a research institute.”
The first forms of money were used in what is now Turkey. Forks, knives and other utensil remnants with dating back the farthest were also found in modern day Turkey.
Islamic expansion, exploration and observation led to many other great wonders of the world. This, sadly, is an inconclusive list and mere taste of what we make use of today with no thought or thanks to its inventors or establishers. Alot of Islamic tactics in medicine, agricultural and schooling can be seen in those methods used by modern Europeans and others.
Indeed, the gifts we revel in today come from the most unexpectant of places – including the treacherous, barbaric and criminalized Middle East. Think about it. Talk about it.
Join the Conversation
Hi Asli,
There is much to be proud of in the history of the east. While its important to remember and cherish this inheritance, isn’t it more important to think and talk about why this is no longer the case? What has caused our society to move from being innovative to being so incurious and unproductive now? Why is it that all the innovation occurs elsewhere?
Hi Chello, that’s an interesting question, and I do think it’s decades of poor and abusive leadership (some of which are ironically funded by the West) that has caused this decay. And while it is true that currently, all this innovation is occuring elsewhere, a lot of this innovation is also being made by Iranian, Arab, Indian, Pakistani, even Saudi expats abroad. You will be surprised when you see the number of non-Western brilliance leading the best innovative advancements in the West, or teaching at the most prestigious schools, due to their lack of opportunities in this region as well as a clear lack of appreciation or respect for their work by our uncaring governments.
In this region, instead of being funded and supported, hard working geniuses are threatened for their literature or science by overly religious extremists, or are censored by the equally zealous politicians/social elites.
This region was once the leader of education, philosophy, math, medecine, et al. It is now considered an embarrassment for all these fields. We need to stay within our countries and change that, instead of fleeing for the sake of comfort abroad. This place will one day come back to what it used to be, but only when the masses commit to such vision.
I would like to clarify my comment:
With this statement, I am in no way claiming that the West is responsible for our mess, I am merely stating that, as much as the U.S government would like to claim otherwise, they do have a record of funding certain dictatorships (not all) who played an active role in destroying all hope for personal freedom. However most of the blame goes towards these regional leaders and their obsessive followers in the first place. It’s horrifying how much power they have in our countries.
A relevant question indeed1
And I find a part answer in Esraa’s post convincing.
Mostly people are discouraged/intimidated/terrorized by man-made part of a religion.
*correction:
The last line should be like:
Most people are discouraged and intimidated by man-made interpretation or dogmas that may present in any religion. For example an Indian mathematic genius Ramanujam in 19th century when invited for research work in U.S was discouraged/restricted by a man-made interpretation of the scripture telling Brahmins must not travel across oceans lest they will become heretics.
Hello dear readers,
I am so happy to read your responses and that it is a topic of interest for many. I do, however, have to write that I am a bit dissapointed in the reaction I am receiving.
It is true that the greater “Middle” East is not flourishing as it once did under famous or infamous empires, as the case may be, and that the funding and encouragment of scientific exploration seems to be lacking when looking from a distance, but the point of this post was not to discuss why it is no longer happening, but instead the ignorance on the part of those who study these subjects (science, medicine, astronomy, etc) who never actually know who the forefathers of their chosen profession are.
Many of you might no be aware but children and students in the U.S are never told these “gifts” or areas of study have roots in the “Middle” east. No, indeed, they are convinced that all of this is from “their” Greek and Roman ancestors (note that most of them are not even Greek or Roman by blood, but they easily take Greeks and Romans as “their” kin). In some cases, very vague words are used to say that something comes from the east: for example, words like Mesopatamia (they think Israeli or Greek), Phoenician (they also think this is Greek or Roman), mathematics is expressed as being Greek in origin – that all ideas regarding math come from Pythagoras. Many also see British or U.S – “enlightened” people to be the holders of a key to unlock the secrets of the Pyramids or other related mysteries.
In the U.S it is safer to say that intelligent inventions or ideas come from the “west,” not the east. This is what remains truly disheartening. I wish to illuminate this troubling phenomenon of demonization.
That was my true intention with this piece.
Warmest of regards,
Asli Omur
http://www.feistyturkishgirl.wordpress.com
Hi,
I like the site. I do have to agree with Asli. I am a “white” guy from the Pacific Northwest, born Catholic of German-Ukranian-Irish descent, and was always raised and educated (high school, middle school and university) with the idea that math, astronomy, physics and geometry were all inventions of Greeks and Romans, and only attributed to “good, Christian people.”
Growing up it was put in our minds that these inventions were created by Christian people and somehow in The Dark Ages this knowledge was lost to most of Europe and that Arabs and the Library of Alexandria were only caretakers of this information and not the inventors.
It is shameful we don’t know about the Arab connection. We should have learned this back in elementary school, when they first introduced math to us. For some reason, the abacus is attributed to the Chinese. It is safer for us to attribute these inventions to our “model minority Asian friends,” and not to Arabs or any other Muslim cultures, for that matter.
I am even shocked to learn that words like alkaline, zero, cotton, algebra and zenith all have Arabic roots. So many words that pepper modern science are Arabic in origin.
Upon reading The Code Book by Simon Singh, it is interesting to learn that in the 6th century Islamic culture was using cryptography and invented cryptanalysis. To quote Singh, “Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of education in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics and linguistics. The Muslim civilization provided an ideal birth place for cryptanalysis, because Islam demands justice in all spheres of human activity, and achieving this requires knowledge, or ilm. Every Muslim is obliged to pursue knowledge in all its forms…” …. “They (Muslim civilizations) endeavored to acquire the knowledge of previous civilizations by obtaining Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Farsi, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew and Roman texts and translating them into Arabic.” – because they reached out to the past civilizations is the reason they had such a breadth of knowledge. The Lebanese or Phoenicians created the idea of translating to do business, for goodness sake!
I am looking forward to getting out there and learning about the rich histories and culture of the middle east. I am going to Morocco and Turkey in February and May to start …
Thank you for this forum.