Al-Asmai 740 AD 
Did You Know That...
1. ...coffee was discovered by an arab
named Khalid in southern Ethiopia, and was brought to
England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened
the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of
London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then
the Italian caffé and then English coffee.
2. ...The first person to realise that
light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the
10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and
physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole
camera after noticing the way light came through a hole
in window shutters. he worked out, the smaller the hole,
the better the picture, and set up the first Camera
Obscura (from the Arab word 'qamara' for a dark or
private room).
3. ...the first man to shift physics from
a philosophical activity to an experimental one was the
10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and
physicist Ibn al-Haitham.
4. ...the game chess was developed into
the form we know it today in Persia. From there it
spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by
the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as
far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh,
which means chariot.
5. ...A thousand years before the Wright
brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and
engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to
construct a flying machine. In 875, aged 70, having
perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he
tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a
significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but
crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was
because he had not given his device a tail so it would
stall on landing.
6. ...Washing and bathing are religious
requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they
perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today.
It was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium
hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil.
7. ...Shampoo was introduced to England by
a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on
Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing
Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.
8. ...Distillation, was invented around
the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn
Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry,
inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus
still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation,
distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and
filtration.
9. ...Jabir Ibn Hayyan, the founder of
modern chemistry, discovered sulphuric and nitric acid
around the year 800, and also invented the alembic
still, giving the world intense rosewater and other
perfumes.
10. ...the crank-shaft was created in the
12th century by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. The crank-shaft
is a device which translates rotary into linear motion
and is central to much of the machinery in the modern
world, not least the engine of vehicles.
11. ...al-Jazari's 1206 Book of Knowledge
of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he invented or
refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of
the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights,
and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other
inventions was the combination lock.
12. ...quilting came to the West via the
Crusaders, who saw it used by Saracen warriors.
13. ...Henry V's castle architect was a
Muslim. Europe's castles were adapted to copy the
Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a
barbican and parapets.
14. ...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.
15. ...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.
16. ...a 10th century Muslim surgeon
called al-Zahrawi 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.
17. ...in the 13th century, a Muslim medic
named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood,
300 years before William Harvey discovered it.
18. ...Muslims doctors also invented
anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed
hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a
technique still used today.
19. ...the windmill was invented in 634
for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw
up water for irrigation. It was 500 years before the
first windmill was seen in Europe.
20. ...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.
21. ...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.
22. ...Algebra was named after Muslim
mathematician, al-Khwarizmi's 825CE 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.
23. ...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.
24. ...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
.
25. ...thanks to the advanced weaving
techniques of medieval Muslims, new tinctures from
Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern
and arabesque, carpets were regarded as part of
Paradise. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly
earthly, until Arabian and Persian carpets were
introduced.
26. ...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.
27. ...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.
28. ...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. The scholar al-Idrisi took a
globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of
Sicily in 1139.
29. ...Medieval 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.
30. ...way back in the 10th century Muslim
doctor Al-Zahrawi pioneered plastic surgery. In fact it
was his practice of using ink to mark the incisions are
now a routine standard
procedure.
....i bet you didn't...
