What scientific breakthroughs did Islam produce? I guess I’m talking about pre-fifth Crusade, but not necessarily. It’s my understanding that after that time they were in no position to invent anything.
Off the top of my head, Algebra, perfume, fractional distillation, advances in anatomy and physiology, advances in astronomy. Is that a good enough start?
Yeah, stuff like this. I’m totally ignorant about this area of the world. I bought a book about their history, but it focuses exclusively on politics. I also wanted science.
What else?
Optics.
Check out these sites for a run-down of the highlights:
Setting the record straight
Legacy of Islam.
More links at:
Muslim Scientists and Islamic Civilization.
In addition to new discoveries, the Muslim world also did a lot to preserve older discoveries. For example, Euclid’s Elements: Every copy currently extant was translated from Arabic copies of the book. The Greek originals were burned in Alexandria.
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, while Western medicine was still married to the “Four Bodily Humours,” Muslim physicians did commonsense things like drain abscesses and set broken bones. Also, spices for flavoring and preserving food were unknown in Europe until returning Crusaders brought back the neat stuff they tasted in the East.
Checking out the links right now, they’re fabulous.
Muslims invented gunpowder? Are these links reliable? I thought I was one of the few people who knew the Chinese did it. Bah. Layers of reality. Can’t handle it right now.
Damascus Steel, the 12 hour day, and camel toe…hahaha
From the Muslim Scientists link:
“Numerous evidence suggests that Muslims from Spain and West Africa arrived in the Americas at least five centuries before Co1umbus.”
Well…this, along with a lot of the other stuff seems debatable.
I agree that some of it seems iffy (for instance, I don’t buy the alleged Islamic origin of the Melungeons). However, the scientific history side is well-documented elsewhere, and not merely by Islamic sources (a few citations here). As others have mentioned, there’s mathematics too: see the University of St Andrews Arabic mathematics page. Many of these mathematicians were working in scientific contexts such as optics, geography and astronomy.
Having recently read deSpragues Ancient engineers, I came upon the following irony, here badly paraphrased:
In the 13th century there were two big philosophers, The Christian Thomas of Aquina, and a muslim guy, whose name I can’t remember. Thomas figured that ‘knowing nature is knowing god’, and started translating and popularising Aristotle etc. At the same time the muslim guy, whose name I cannot remember, thought that concentrating on worldly stuff means that we can’t think of the Creator, and thus science is anathema to religion.
The result was that the West rose (albeit slowly) from the Dark Ages, whereas the East concentrated more and more on scripture, rather than research.
The irony is that the muslim guy was right. Current science has indeed undermined religion, but it has also given us indoor plumbing and the internet.
[/paraphrase]
Science has always been anathema to religion, since one must essentially throw scientific reasoning ability out the window in order to condition one’s mind to accept as truth the preposterous goings-on in the mythologic tales. I mean, honestly–if you made it up out of your head today and tried to force people to believe it and give you money, as was done way back when, you’d be incarcerated as a danger to society, a complete loony. Then you’d be given your own daytime talk show.
Oh, I hope this is true…if for no other reason than to know who to put at the top of my historical “hit list” as soon as I finish building my time machine. 
Proto-Luddites…I hate those guys.
Not true.
Many people through the ages have postulated that “God created the universe, and humans capable of thinking - therefore it must be his idea that we think of these things.”
It turns out that modern science is incompatible with (a literal interpretation of) religion, but that was not always the case.
Newton, for example, was very religous and thought that a better understanding of gravity would enable us to understand and respect the Creator even more.
The fact that eminent scientists such as Newton (who was also a crackpot in so many, many other ways) were religious does not mean that science is neccessarily compatible with religion.
Agreed. Also in the great era of Muslim science under discussion, science was closely linked with religion. I forgot the actual phrasing, but as I recall, they believed under Islam that acquiring a better understanding of how the universe worked was a responsibility.
A peculiar statement. There are plenty of contributions to Islamic science after that time. One that I’m particularly interested in is the work of al Farisi and others on the rainbow – they experimented with model raindrops and made the first correct interpretation of the phenomenon. They also observed the very first tertiary rainbow (in the laboratory). About twenty years later a German monk, Theodoric of Freeiborg, did the same, apparently independently, around 1400. Then everyone forgot about this work for another couple of hundred years.
There’s an article here (.PDF format) - The Rise and Fall of Islamic Science. The Calendar: a Case Study - that explains well how science and Islam intermeshed successfully, along with a theory of the philosophical changes that led to a downer on innovation.
Just wanted to put in a plug for Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Years of Rice and Salt. He postulates the course of civilization if 99% of Christian Europe’s population had been wiped out in the Black Plague. He has the Muslims go on to invent modern physics in the 17th century. Well, duh you say. If Kepler and Newton hadn’t, somebody else would have, and who better than Muslims? But the way he wove the scientific discovery into the story line was really well done, you just have to read it and see what I mean. He also had the Japanese and Chinese discovering America. Across the Pacific.
raygirvan is right about Islamic science having been integrated with religion. It isn’t a slam dunk that there always has to be a conflict between the two. Westerners still haven’t gotten over their hangup about the Church suppressing Galileo. Islam wasn’t like that at all. What damaged the Islamic intellectual life was the devastating Mongol invasions and the subsequent retreat into unimaginative lines of thought as a defense mechanism.
Late in 2001 a Parsi science author from Pakistan, Pervez Hoodbhoy, circulated an article accusing the 11th-century theologian al-Ghazzali for ruining Islamic rational thought. It attracted some attention as though that explained all about where Islam ran off the rails. Things aren’t as simplistic as that. You can’t fix the cause for an entire civilization’s decline on one man’s theology. Ibn Rushd (Averroës) lived in Spain, came after al-Ghazzali, and refuted his refutation of rational philosophy. Averroism in Latin translation went on the become the intellectual foundation of the High Middle Ages in Europe. Spanish Muslims never went for al-Ghazzali’s attack on philosophy. Unfortunately, the Reconquista in Spain erased their uniquely beautiful civilization. In Iran, rational Islamic philosophy and science continued until the modern ages despite al-Ghazzali (even though al-Ghazzali himself was Iranian). But because European historians of thought only paid attention to what affected Europe, they ignored Iranian philosophy as Persia was not directly communicating with Europe in the late Middle Ages. When Islamic thought declined in the West, the Eurocentric historians ignored the continuation of it in the East as though it didn’t exist. The reality is much more complex than any simplistic theories can account for. The single biggest factor in impeding Islamic rational philosophy and science, in my view, was the Mongol invasions, but even that doesn’t completely account for it. Iran was devastated by the Mongols, but managed to continue the study of philosophy and science despite the difficulty. However, Iran was taken over by the Shi‘ite Safavids in the 16th and 17th centuries (it had been a majority Sunni country before then). I think that probably tended to cut off communication between Iran and the Sunni world thereafter.
The most damaging theologian was not al-Ghazzali, who was after all a master of rational philosophy despite his critique of it. No, the real villain was Ibn Taymiyah, the 14th-century Syrian heretic whose antirational theology became the basis for Wahhabism and other violent, destructive fundamentalism in the modern age. The origin of al-Qa‘idah is traceable directly to Ibn Taymiyah. He was discredited in his own time, but the crazies of today have pushed his pernicious thought to the forefront via sheer brutal violence and force.