Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's deputy First Minister, on Tuesday opened a new exhibition at the Glasgow Science Centre entitled '1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World'.
The '1001 inventions' website says that the exhibition - partly funded by public money - is being held because "few people are aware how well-known inventions which helped to pave the way towards the progress of modern civilisation were deeply rooted in Muslim civilisation, from soap-making to surgical procedures."
Perhaps the exhibition's most interesting claim is that Abbas Ibn Firnas, a ninth-century Muslim inventor, "built a glider which was capable of carrying a human being".
Closer inspection reveals this to be less than entirely true.
According to the 1001 inventions website, Abbas instead developed a "wing-like cloak which he could glide on."
In 852 AD in the Spanish city of Cordoba, Abbas put his cloak/glider to the test and leapt out of the window of a tall tower.
Moments later, the would-be aviator and his "glider" collided with the ground at the foot of the tower.
The 1001 Inventions website notes that during this, "the first really scientific attempt to fly in the Muslim World", Abbas sustained "only minor injuries".
The exhibition also claims that Muslims invented gardens, town planning, libraries, windmills, soap and toothbrushes (Muhammad used a stick to clean his teeth).
Nicola Sturgeon, opening the exhibition, said that the Scottish government would pay for classes of school children to visit the event.
But the exhbition is not only funded by Scottish money.
The group's website lists the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Department of Trade and Industry, Manchester University and Manchester City Council as partners and supporters.
Comments (1)
The history of science is too important to be left to Islamic propagandists who believe that everything that came before Islam and everything that is not Islam is ignorance. It could be argued that when they conquered Persia the Arabs burst in upon a Jewish/Zoroastrian/Jacobite and Nestorian intellectual enlightenmnet already in full swing, that it was kept going by rulers who had an un-Islamic, rationalist attitude towards their religion, was kept going by techniques and ideas derived from other cultures before eventually being strangled by the literalist, prescriptive Islam of the ulema and the masses, three centuries later. At least they are not claiming to have preserved the knowledge of the Greeks and passed it on to the West: we owe the whole of Plato, the history and literature and (a century or two later) clean scientific and mathematical texts to the Byzantines.
Posted by Anonymous | October 25, 2007 12:04 AM
Posted on October 25, 2007 00:04