Islamic Heritage

1001 Inventions : Muslim Heritage in Our World
Muslim Heritage and the 21st Century
What Islam did for Us : Understanding Islam's Contribution to Western Civilisation
Lost History : The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists
Science and Islam : A History
The House of Wisdom : How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation
Destiny Disrupted : A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

Page Last Updated : 23rd January 2010

ISLAMIC HISTORY | ANDALUSIA | HISTORIC BATTLES | BIOGRAPHY OF THE BELOVED PROPHET

1001 Inventions (Book) : Muslim Heritage in Our World, 2nd Edition

Hardback 370 pages

What do coffee beans, torpedoes, surgical scalpels, arches and observatories all have in common?

Were Leonardo da Vinci’s flight ideas originals?

Who devised the casing for pill capsules and where did Fibonacci learn to flex his mathematical fingers?

All these answers can be found here in ‘1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World’.

Over 370 pages of colour photographs and written in an accessible style for those with limited knowledge of either Islam or history.

A golden age of civilisation, from 600 and 1600 CE, will unfold, because medieval Muslims were trailblazers in fields as diverse as medicine and mechanics, cartography and chemistry, education and engineering, architecture and astronomy. No area was too obscure to miss the scrutiny of enquiry backed up by rigid scientific experimentation.

So get comfortable with this guidebook and prepare to begin on a voyage of discovery through a thousand years of science and technology into the lives of medieval pioneers whose ingenious inventions have helped create our world today.

Review:

"This glorious book overflows with the great ideas of the Muslim middle ages. From al-Jazari and his elegant clocks and al-Kindi and Ibn al-Haitham with their revolutionary optical theories, experiments, and books, to the astronomers who navigated across the desert by the stars, and the map-makers who put north at the bottom, every page is a mine of joyous information. There are even recipes to try out, and everything is beautifully illustrated. I wish I had had this book fifty years ago." ---Adam Hart-Davis; Photographer, Writer and TV Science Presenter of BBC Series ‘What the Ancients Did for Us’.

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Muslim Heritage and The 21st Century : by Muhammad Ahsan

Paperback - 100 pages

Muhammad Ahsan : A dedicated research scholar, has extensively published on social and economic issues particularly in relation to the Muslim World. His recent work focuses on globalisation and the Muslim world.

The contribution of the Muslim World to a wide range of sciences and academic disciplines is often overlooked or taken for granted. This book provides a glimpse of the rich cultural heritage within the Muslim World and the significant role that Muslims have played in the advancement of knowledge.

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What Islam did for us - Understanding Islam's Contribution to Western Civilisation Paperback - 260 pages by Tim Wallace Murphy

In these troubled and extremist times, when the religion and culture of Islam are under seemingly perpetual attack, it is salutary to consider how much we, living in the Christian West, have in common with, and how much we owe to, the spiritual insights of that great culture.

Religious tolerance, respect for learning, the concepts of chivalry and brotherhood - these principles were brought by the Islamic Moors when, in medieval Spain, they acted as "Beacons of Light" in the Dark Ages of European religious arrogance, intolerance and persecution. The Moors gave Europe an architectural and artistic heritage that is still a source of wonder to the modern world. It was in translation from Arabic, not the original Greek, that knowledge of Greek philosophy became prominent in Christian thought.

Western mathematics are based on Arabic numerals and calculations, and the first effective medical school in Europe was founded by Jewish doctors who had been trained in Moorish Spain and North Africa. Tim Wallace-Murphy shows how over the last century it was European Western powers who laid the foundations for the chaos that reigns in the Middle East. We need to find a just and equitable solution to these problems and we should begin by acknowledging our common spiritual heritage and the profound debt that Western civilization owes to Islamic culture.

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Lost History - The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists

Paperback - 320 pages by Michael Hamilton Morgan

Product Description : Early Muslim culture set the foundation for the Rennaissance of Europe and for nearly every aspect of the modern world. In this age of conflict, "Lost History" provides a vital look at the Muslim world and its deep connection to all cultures. Unlike many histories, which address the noted Arab Golden Age of Baghdad, Persia, and Muslim Spain from 632 to 1258 AD and the fall of Baghdad, "Lost History" reveals the many 'golden ages' of Muslim thought, from Iran to Mughal India, to the 18th century. Engaging chapters introduce a contemporary accountant, obstetrician, civil engineer, or astrophysicist, all whose work is linked to early Muslim advancements. Artful flashbacks render page-turning accounts of such luminaries as Al Ma'mun, who founded Baghdad's international House of Wisdom from which came foundations for modern math, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and literature; Al Khwarizmi, often considered the Father of Algebra, whose invention of algorithms makes possible cell phones today; revered Arab philospher Al Kindi, who wrote, 'nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself;' Astronomer Al Manon, for whom is named a crater of the moon; the exiled Emir Abdal Rahman, who brought to Cordoba, Spain, irrigation systems and unique architecture; and the Syrian-born Al Nafis, who revealed that the blood flows from the heart, through the lungs, to the body and back again. Finally, readers discover that Omar Khayyam, well-loved poet of the Rubaiyat, was a mathematical wizard who calculated the length of a year to be 365.242 days (later calculated by atomic clocks to within millionths of a second). Writes the author: 'By recovering lost history together, maybe we can really get at the issues of today that will never be solved by force. Because if there is no other lesson to be drawn from "Lost History", it is that force rarely ever positively resolves issues of the spirit and the soul - whether in individuals, or in civilizations.'

Review : "Mathematics, astronomy and medicine; those are three of the many disciplines that would not exist in their present form without the contributions of Muslim scholars and thinkers throughout the centuries. We in the West don't often remember that." ---Aaron Schachter, Anchor, "BBC "The World"

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Science and Islam : A History by Ehsan Masood

Hardback - 256 pages

The official tie-in to the BBC television series, Science and Islam tells the story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science: the extraordinary Islamic scientific revolution between 700 and 1400 CE. It charts a religious empire's scientific heyday, its decline, and the many debates that now surround it.

Between the 8th and 15th centuries, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy to new heights.

It was Musa al-Khwarizmi, for instance, who developed algebra in 9th-century Baghdad, drawing on work by mathematicians in India; there was also al-Jazari, a Turkish engineer of the 13th century whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft, and the reciprocating piston; and ibn-Sina, whose textbook Canon of Medicine was a standard work in Europe's universities until the 1600s. These scientists were part of a sophisticated culture and civilisation that was based on belief in God - a picture which helps to scotch the myth of the 'Dark Ages' and the idea that scientific progress falters because of religion.

Ehsan Masood is Acting Chief Commissioning Editor at Nature and teaches international science policy at Imperial College London. He also writes for Prospect and OpenDemocracy.net and is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's Home Planet.

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The House of Wisdom : How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization

Hardback - 272 pages by Jonathan Lyons

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backward and benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell the time of day. Augustine had decreed that belief, not reason, should be the guiding light of Christian thinking and partially as a result Europeans lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming, where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine, and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to its own ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars - the Crusades.

Arab culture, however, was thriving, and had become a powerhouse of intellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes of Adelard of Bath who ventured to the Near East in search of the scientific riches pouring out of cities like Antioch or Baghdad, whose House of Wisdom held four hundred thousand books at a time when the best European libraries housed, at most, several dozen.

The Arabs could measure the earth’s circumference, a feat not matched in the West for eight hundred years; they discovered algebra; were adept at astronomy and navigation, developed the astrolabe, translated all the Greek scientific and philosophical texts including, importantly, those of Aristotle; they made paper lenses and mirrors. Without them, and the knowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europe would in all likelihood have been a very different place over the last millennium.

Review : ‘A wonderful and important book which for the first time presents the Western debt to medieval Arabic learning in a clear, accessible manner. From the azimuth to the zenith, from algebra to the zero, so much of what the West takes for granted came to us from the Arab world . . . A fascinating book’ ---William Dalrymple

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Destiny Disrupted : A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

Hardback - 416 pages by Tamim Ansary

Book Description :
This sweeping history illuminates how Muslims must have seen the history of the world - and what western world history leaves out.

We in the West share a common narrative of world history - that runs from the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, through Greece and Rome and the French Revolution, to the rise of the secular state and the triumph of democracy. But our story largely omits a whole civilization that until quite recently saw itself at the center of world history, and whose citizens shared an entirely different narrative for a thousand years.

In "Destiny Disrupted", Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as the Islamic world saw it, form the time of the Beloved Prophet Muhammad May Allah bless him and grant him peace, to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. He clarifies why our civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe - a place it long perceived as primitive and disorganized - had somehow hijacked destiny. Entertaining and enlightening, "Destiny Disrupted" also offers a vital perspective on current conflicts.

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