With people questioning Islamic attitudes on modern science i thought I would give equal time to a site dedicated to Islam’s legacy of contributions to modern civilization: 1001 Inventions
Enjoy!
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COMMENTS / 5 COMMENTS
Elizabeth added these pithy words on 14 Mar 06 at 12:29 pmI was really pleased about the link, but I’m glad I looked further before forwarding it.
This site was disappointing in that they took for granted that any invention made by Arabic, Persian, or Turkic people was automatically “Muslim”. For example, I noticed that chess is noted as Muslim, because they came to the west through the “Muslim” world. But even people who attribute chess to the Middle East (though it’s disputed) believe that the game was invented long before Mohammed was a twinkle in his daddy’s eye.
Also, it asserts that Muslims introduced cosmetics to the West (the title of that section is “The Invention of Cosmetics”). Call me crazy, but I think that it’s been shown that peoples all over the world, from South America to the sub-continent have been using cosmetics ever since they realized that blackberries turn your lips red.
The list goes on.
Certainly Muslims are not the only people to attribute everything to their own civilization, but this was a real disappointment. I went looking for science and got more bluster.
Catholicgauze added these pithy words on 14 Mar 06 at 11:38 pmHow about things invented by Islamic culture in the last 300 years? Would that create a long enough list?
Pavlov3 added these pithy words on 14 Mar 06 at 11:49 pmCatholicgauze:
That would only inlude the fatwa and jihad, a very short list.
shakuhachi added these pithy words on 16 Mar 06 at 11:09 amA lot of the inventions attributed to ‘Islam’ (why dont other religions get kudos for inventions?) were actually invented in muslim controlled lands by infidel non muslims.
That linked site says the astrolabe is an muslim invention, but the astrolabe was developed before Mohammed was born. The works of the pagan philosophers like Aristotle that are often said to have been preserved by ‘Islam’ were actually preserved by non muslim infidels like Yahya ibn ‘Adi, a Syrian Christian.
Even the architectural wonder of the Dome of the Rock, the pride of Islamic civilization was built and designed not by muslims, but by Byzantine artisans.
There are some instances of muslim achievement in the sciences, but often Islam intervened to make sure that scientific development was halted. In medicine, muslims were the first to establish pharmacies and require standards of doctors and pharmacists, to be enforced by an examination system. Under the reign of the fifth caliph, Harun al-Rashid (753-809), the first hospital was established in Bagdad, and others followed. But modern medical advances were not made by muslims (or since we are saying that a religion can produce advances, ‘by Islam’) because muslims were forbidden to dissect human bodies. It was a Beligian doctor, Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) that made the breakthrough for modern science by giving the first accurate discription of the human internal organs.
Lets not even discuss the arts or music, which Islam suppresses even more than it does science.
I could go on and on, but this comment is already long enough. I mean to say that far from ‘Islam’ being responsible for scientific discovery, whatever muslims discovered as in spite of having Islam holding them back.
