TRANSFER OF ISLAMIC TECHNOLOGY TO THE WEST

TRANSFER OF ISLAMIC TECHNOLOGY TO THE WEST
PART II
TRANSMISSION OF ISLAMIC ENGINEERING


here: http://www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%2071.htm

Twin Cylinder Suction Pump of Al-Jazari

The Real Men Of The Renaissance

Most western authors contend that the Renaissance emerged when Europeans studied Greek and Roman civilizations then developed new arts and sciences. These racist views hide or deny the massive effort to translate Arabic books to Latin, study them, and copy the Muslim civilization without giving appropriate credit to the "real" authors. Most Europeans had discovered the magnificent Muslim civilization during their crusades against the Muslims in Iberia and the Middle East.

The Qur'an, as the final word of God, anticipated many of the modern scientific discoveries which were beyond human imagination 14 centuries ago. The Muslim scientific revolution, which produced the renaissance that put Muslims at the top of the civilized world for 8 centuries, was a result of contemplating the clues in the Qur'an about the physical world.

The Muslim contributions are still evident today, 7 centuries after the destruction of the Muslim cultural centers in Asia by Genghis Khan and Hulagu, and 5 centuries after the destruction of the great Muslim cultural centers in Iberia by the Spaniards.

Arabic numerals, algebra, logarithms, and algorithms prove the West learned mathematics from the Muslims. al-Khawarizmi who died in 850 AD, introduced Algebra, the zero, negative numbers, algorithms (programs or software), and the decimal system to the West. One cannot imagine computers using Roman numerals. One cannot imagine the digital age without zeros.

read the full article here: http://home.att.net/~a.f.aly/renaissance.htm

Arab Contributions to Civilization

source , and full article: http://www.adc.org/index.php?id=247

Much like America today, the Arab world of the seventh to the thirteenth centuries was a great cosmopolitan civilization. It was an enormous unifying enterprise, one which joined the peoples of Spain and North Africa in the west with the peoples of the ancient lands of Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia in the east. It was the rapid expansion of Islam that initially brought this empire together. Alliances were made, trade routes were opened, lands and peoples were welded into a new force. Islam provided the dynamism, but it was the Arabic language, which provided the bond that held it together. Islam spread to lands more distant than North Africa and the Fertile Crescent, but it was in this area that a common Arab culture emerged. To be Arab, then as now, was not to come from a particular race or lineage. To be Arab, like American, was (and is) a civilization and a cultural trait rather than a racial mark. To be Arab meant to be from the Arabic-speaking world – a world of common traditions, customs and value – shaped by a single and unifying language. The Arab civilization brought together Muslims, Christians and Jews. It unified Arabians, Africans, Berbers, Egyptians, and the descendants of the Phoenicians, Canaanites, and many other people. This great “melting pot” was not without tensions, to be sure, but it was precisely the tension of this mixing and meeting of peoples that produced the vibrant and dynamic new civilization, the remarkable advances of which we outline in this ADC Issues.