Coffee
Roasted Coffee Beans |
About 1,600,000,000 cups of coffee
are consumed every day around the world. Billions of people rely on it as part
of their daily routines. And yet, very few people are aware of the Muslim
origins of this ubiquitous drink.
According to the historical record,
in the 1400s coffee became a very popular drink among Muslims in Yemen, in the
southern Arabian Peninsula. Legend goes that a shepherd (some say in Yemen,
some say in Ethiopia) noticed that his goats became very energetic and jumpy
when they ate beans from a particular tree. He had the courage to try them
himself, noticing they gave him an energy boost. Over time, the tradition of
roasting the beans and immersing them in water to create a sour yet powerful
drink developed, and thus, coffee was born.
Regardless of whether or not the
story of the shepherd ever really happened, coffee found its way from the
highlands of Yemen to the rest of the Ottoman Empire, the premier Muslim empire
of the 15th century. Coffeehouses specializing in the new drink began to spring
up in all the major cities of the Muslim world: Cairo, Istanbul, Damascus,
Baghdad. From the Muslim world, the drink found its way into Europe through the
great merchant city of Venice. Although it was at first denounced as the
“Muslim drink” by Catholic authorities, coffee became a part of European
culture. The coffeehouses of the 1600s was where philosophers met and discussed
issues such as the rights of man, the role of government, and democracy. These
discussions over coffee spawned what became the Enlightenment one of the most powerful intellectual movements of the
modern world.
From a Yemeni/Ethiopian shepherd to
shaping European political thought to over 1 billion cups per day, this Muslim
innovation is one of the most important inventions of human history.
Algebra
While many secondary school students
struggling through math classes may not particularly appreciate the importance
of algebra, it is one of the most important contributions of the Muslim Golden
Age to the modern world. It was developed by the great scientist and
mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarazimi who
lived from 780 to 850 in Persia and Iraq.
In his monumental book, Al-Kitāb
al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala (English:
The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing), he
set forth the basic principles of algebraic equations. The name of the book
itself contains the word “al-jabr”, meaning “completion”, from which the Latin
word algebra is derived. In the book, al-Khawarizmi explains how to
use algebraic equations with unknown variables to solve real-world problems
such as zakat calculation and inheritance division. A unique aspect of his
reasoning for developing algebra is the desire to make calculations mandated by
Islamic law easier to complete in a world without calculators and computers.
Al-Khawarizimi’s books were
translated into Latin in Europe in the 1000s and 1100s, where he was known as
Algoritmi (the word algorithm is based on his name and his
mathematical works). Without his work in developing algebra, modern practical
applications of math, such as engineering, would not be possible. His
works were used as math textbooks in European universities for hundreds of
years after his death.
Degree-Granting
Universities
The University of Karaouine in Fes |
Speaking of universities, that is
also an invention made possible by the Muslim world. Early on in Islamic
history, mosques doubled as schools. The same people who led prayers would
teach groups of students about Islamic sciences such as Quran, fiqh
(jurisprudence), and hadith. As the Muslim world grew however, there needed to
be formal institutions, known as madrasas, dedicated to the
education of students.
The first formal madrasa was
al-Karaouine, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri in Fes, Morocco. Her school
attracted some of the leading scholars of North Africa, as well as the land’s
brightest students. At al-Karaouine, students were taught by teachers for a
number of years in a variety of subjects ranging from secular to religious
sciences. At the end of the program, if the teachers deemed their students qualified,
they would grant them a certificate known as an ijaza, which recognizes
that the student understood the material and is now qualified to teach it.
These first degree-granting
educational institutes quickly spread throughout the Muslim world. Al-Azhar
University was founded in Cairo in 970, and in the 1000s, the Seljuks
established dozens of madrasas throughout the Middle East. The concept of
institutes that grant certificates of completion (degrees) spread into Europe
through Muslim Spain, where European students would travel to study. The
Universities of Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England were founded in the 11th
and 12th centuries and continued the Muslim tradition of granting degrees to
students who deserved them, and using it as a judge of a person’s
qualifications in a particular subject.
Military
Marching Bands
An Ottoman mehter band |
Many students who attended high
schools and universities in the Western world are familiar with the marching
band. Made up of a group of a few hundred musicians, a band marches onto a
field during an sporting event to entertain the audience and cheer on the
players. These school marching bands developed from the use of marching
military bands during the Gunpowder Age in Europe that were designed to
encourage soldiers during battle. This tradition has its origins in the Ottoman
mehter bands of the 1300s that helped make the Ottoman army one of the most
powerful in the world.
As part of the elite Janissary corps
of the Ottoman Empire, the mehter band’s purpose was to play loud music that
would frighten enemies and encourage allies. Using enormous drums and clashing
cymbals, the sounds created by a mehter band could stretch for miles. During
the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans throughout the 14th -16th centuries, mehter
bands accompanied the fearsome Ottoman armies, who seemed almost invincible
even in the face of huge European alliances.
Eventually, Christian Europe also
caught on to the use of military bands to frighten enemies. Legend has it that
after the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, the retreating Ottoman army left
behind dozens of musical instruments, which the Austrians collected, studied,
and put to their own use. Armies all over Europe soon began implementing
marching military bands, revolutionizing the way war was fought in Europe for
centuries.
Cameras
The basic principle of a pinhole camera |
It’s hard to imagine a world without
photography. Billion dollar companies like Instagram and Canon are based on the
idea of capturing light from a scene, creating an image from it, and
reproducing that image. But doing so is impossible without the trailblazing
work of the 11th century Muslim scientist, Ibn
al-Haytham, who developed the field of optics and described how the first
cameras work.
Working in the imperial city of
Cairo in the early 1000s, Ibn al-Haytham was one of the greatest scientists of
all time. To regulate scientific advancements, he developed the scientific
method, the basic process by which all scientific research is conducted. When
he was put under house arrest by the Fatimid ruler
al-Hakim, he had the time and ability to study how light works. His research
partially focused on how the pinhole camera worked. Ibn al-Haytham was the
first scientist to realize that when a tiny hole is put onto the side of a
lightproof box, rays of light from the outside are projected through that
pinhole into the box and onto the back wall of it. He realized that the smaller
the pinhole (aperture), the sharper the image quality, giving him the ability
to build cameras that were incredibly accurate and sharp when capturing an
image.
Ibn al-Haytham’s discoveries
regarding cameras and how to project and capture images led to the modern
development of cameras around the same concepts. Without his research into how
light travels through apertures and is projected by them, the modern mechanisms
inside everyone’s cameras would not exist.
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