8) Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers
of cloth with a layer of insulating material in between. It is not
clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was
imported there from India or China. But it certainly came to the West
via the Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore
straw-filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form
of protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the
Crusaders’ metal armour and was an effective form of insulation – so
much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder climates
such as Britain and Holland.
9) 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. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed
vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe’s castles
were also adapted to copy the Islamic world’s – with arrow slits,
battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps gave way
to more easily defended round ones. Henry V’s castle architect was a
Muslim.
10) 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. It was he who 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. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic named Ibn
Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William
Harvey discovered it. Muslim doctors also invented anaesthetics of opium
and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from
eyes in a technique still used today.
11) The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian
caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In
the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only
source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for
months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It
was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.
12) 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.
13) 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.
14) The system of numbering in use all round the
world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is
Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim
mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named
after al-Khwarizmi’s 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. 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.
15) 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 (which
had been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn
Firnas – see No 4).
16) Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by
medieval Muslims, thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new
tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern
and arabesque which were the basis of Islam’s non-representational art.
In contrast, Europe’s floors were distinctly earthly, not to say earthy,
until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In England, as
Erasmus recorded, floors were “covered in rushes, occasionally renewed,
but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes
for 20 years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs
and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit
to be mentioned”. Carpets, unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.
17) 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.
18) 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. 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.
19) Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder,
and used it in their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it
could be purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim
incendiary devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had
invented both a rocket, which they called a “self-moving and combusting
egg”, and a torpedo – a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at
the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.
20) 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.
“1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in
Our World” is a new exhibition which began a nationwide tourthis week.
It is currently at the Science Museum in Manchester. For more
information, go to www.1001inventions.com
