AFAIK early Muslims had no problem with drinking alcohol. The only injunction I’ve ever seen in the Koran is against praying while drunk. There are passages prohibiting the use of intoxicants but it seems doubtful if this was ever meant to refer to wine. Lke a alot of religious restrictions I suspect it’s a later addition to the tradition rather than anything specifically stated by the religion’s founder.
The most important contribution I can think of is Arabic Numerals…I can’t even begin to imagine how one can do math using Roman Numerals.
Uh, I thought what we call “Arabic” numerals actually originated in India, where the concept of zero also came from (IIRC).
Did Muslims invent algebra? I thought the Greeks did this. For example the Pythagorean theorem: a squared + b squared = c squared.
But maybe this isn’t algebra.
Another Arab innovation: perfume, which also stems from the whole alchohol/alchemy advances. The first true perfume, rosewater, was created by the aforementioned physician Avicenna by infusing rose petals with alchohol.
And to refute ElJeffe’s assertion, Arab scientists and doctors continue to contribute to modern medical advances. A brief PubMed search shows 25971 papers by authors (or co-authors) with an affiliation to an institution in Turkey, 3399 with Lebanese affiliation, 1353 with Egyptian affiliation, and 655 with Moroccan affiliation. Obviously, not all these authors are Muslim, and not all Muslim authors are in these countries, but it is a reasonable indicator that scientific inquiry continues to thrive in the Muslim world.
Blake, I agree. Although some sources, such as Muslims and alcohol, portray alcohol use as virtually collapsing on the adoption of Islam, there are plenty of later references to wine use in Islamic cultures, such as in the Arabian Nights and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (Khayyam incidentally being a significant mathematician as well as a writer).
Major Kong: the Greeks knew such relations as Pythagoras Theorem and had techniques for (e.g.) root-finding, but they handled them via geometrical constructions, without algebraic notation.
The Pythagorean Theorem is Geometry, not Algebra. The ancient Greeks were great geometers but not so great at algebra (IIRC, once again). Actually, an algebraic proof of this theorem would not have been accepted by Greek mathematicians.
Well, the Muslims didn’t have algebraic notation either. That developed later in Europe.
This site lists a plethora of notable Islamic scientists towards the bottom. Al-Razi, a Persian medicine man and chemist, discovered both sulfuric acid and the use of alcohol for sterilization purposes. He also penned the first known description of smallpox and measles, among other ailments. Furthermore, he had a reputation of being a gifted musician. His medical works were the penultimate source of ailment and injury in the Islamic world and Middle Age Europe for centuries. On top of these accomplishments, Razi also wrote more than a dozen books on philosophy.
So, we have numerous Islamic and/or Arab contributions to the world, including algebra, the compass, the use of alcohol as sterlization, beautiful architecture, poetry, folklore, and some of the first true insights into chemistry, cartography and astronomy as a whole.
There are Ayas in the Qur’an forbidding the consumption of “Khamr”, which I believe specifically referred to date wine, but was later expanded by The Prophet to include any substance which clouds the mind. The earlier injunctions against prayer while drunk were given at a time when prayer was only done two or three times daily. after prayer was commanded five times a day, the prohibition against all intoxicants came along.
As for the OP, I don’t think there were any recent contributions, unless one counts the recent rise in converts since 9-11, (I do).
Islamic civilization contributed greatly to what we have now, then stagnated for a myriad of reasons. Our Golden Age has passed, but nothing says that it won’t come again. As Islam is becoming less entwined with it’s traditional cultures and more modern, reasonable muslims become significant, we will take our place once again, inshAllah.
Don’t forget Hygeine, particularly among doctors:D
Martin
Anything in the last 150 years?
dtilque: Europe’s algebraic notation developed from the Muslims’ usage.
Science has become much more secular in the last few centuries, and religion is less dominant in general. What has any religion contributed on this scale in the last 150 years?
al-Khwarizmi was an Iranian (as his name indicates), but he wrote in Arabic, as Arabic was the international language of learning all over the Islamic world in those days.
They may not have used algebraic notation as it exists today, but they did begin developing it at that time. al-Khwarizmi used the Arabic letter shîn to represent the unknown quantity. It was an abbreviation for the Arabic word shay’, meaning ‘a thing, something’.
When the medieval European translators in Toledo translated al-Khwarizmi’s algebra into Latin, they used the letter x where the Arabic text had used shîn. The reason being that in medieval Spanish, the letter x was used to write the “sh” sound (which isn’t found in modern Spanish).
Alcohol is from the same Arabic word as kohl, the fine powder of antimony used as eyeliner. (This word, and the word for alchemy, use the Arabic letter for k, not q. They are two different letters in Arabic. It’s true that too often the Arabic q has been mistransliterated as “k”, for example Qur’an spelled “Koran”— but when you take the real Arabic k and write “q” for it, that’s what linguists call “hypercorrection.” Just the other day I was reading Pico Iyer’s novel Abandon, about Sufism, and he hypercorrected the name of the Ka‘bah by writing “Qa’ba.” Wrong, Pico.)
Oh I thought we were talking about individuals (muslims) as compared to the religion (islam) as a whole. No “religion” as a whole has ever contributed anything to mankind other than social control.
Some Nobel Prize winners, including some in chemistry and medicine. A bunch of authors. Not that he was a particularly great Muslim, but Gamal Nasser was one of the leading spokesmen of the non-aligned movement, which was politically influential as a alternative to cold war politics, so there are a few people.
What about contributions by Muslim females? Oh wait, that’s against the law.
JillGat, was that sarcasm? (Why doesn’t the board have a sarcasm smiley?) Muslim women are commanded to seek knowledge just the same as men are. The Prophet said: “Seeking knowledge is an obligation on every Muslim, male and female.”
I was also going to write about the issue of the Arabic numerals that aren’t originally Arabic but came from India. It’s only the Europeans that called them “Arabic” numerals. The Arabs themselves acknowledge that they got them from India. The Arabic name for what we call Arabic numerals is al-arqâm al-Hindîyah, which means ‘the Indian numerals’.
Jomo, are you saying that women in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia have the same rights as men? That’s not what I heard. Not all countries with Muslim populations repress women, I know. But I had heard that in Saudi Arabia - and in some other Middle Eastern countries - women were not allowed to drive, to enter certain public buildings unescorted, to travel without permission from a male relative, etc. Please correct me if I’m wrong. So yes, it was sarcasm.
JillGat, you may be a victim of the “news headlines capture all the public attention, obscuring the important background information that doesn’t fit into sound bites” syndrome.
Saudi Arabian laws restricting women are regarded around the rest of the Muslim world as unjustifiable.
But the actual basis for women’s equality in Islam, found in the original sources (see my quote above for one example) tends to get ignored in the media sound bites. This is why we have the Straight Dope.
Saudi Arabia is controlled by Wahhabis, which mainstream thinkers in Islam have regarded as a deviant sect ever since it first arose over two centuries ago. The Ottoman Empire considered it a dangerous and pernicious heresy. Ask the British and Uncle Sam why they supported Wahhabis to the detriment of the traditional mainstream moderate interpretations of Islam.