Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world
Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world - CNN.com
Coffee houses, surgical techniques, algrebra, some key institutional developments in universities and hospitals, all from Muslim science. Not to mention optics, astronomical advances (some think they influenced Copernicus), etc.
And those alcoholic stills so popular in Kentucky during Prohibition? Yup, Jabir ibn Hayyan was behind them.
I don't know if Muslims invented it, but Franz Rosenthal showed that smoking pot was a big part of medieval Muslim popular culture (the Qur'an forbids date wine but doesn't say anything about pot, though many clerics forbade it by analogy. Like most clerical prohibitions, a lot of people paid no attention.)
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posted by Juan Cole @ 1/30/2010 02:26:00 PM
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I've seen some notes that suggest that smoking cannabis goes back millennia, possibly to the neolithic.
"Marijuana was probably first used as an intoxicant in India around 1000 B.C., and soon became an integral part of Hindu culture (Snyder, 1970: 125).
"In China, where the marijuana plant had been used to make cloth and certain medicines for centuries, it was not recorded as an intoxicant. Explanations are unclear as to why marijuana was used as an intoxicant in India but not in China.
"Marijuana was also used as an intoxicant in other parts of the world prior to 500 A.D. but was not as well documented as the use of opium.
"The drug 'nepenthe' in Homer's Odyssey is believed by a number of scholars to have been a brew in which the most active ingredient was hemp (Brotteaux, 1967: 10).
"Galen wrote in the second century that it was customary to promote hilarity and happiness at banquets by giving the guests hemp (Reininger, 1967: 14-15)."
Source http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/mj003.htm
The Muslims learned about algebra from the Hindus. They did expand on it and improve it though. Then brought it to Europe of course.
Equally important, they got the concept of zero from the Hindus as well.
So would we ever call European inventions "Christian Inventions"? How can an invention have a religion? Why must people who invent and who have a Muslim faith be identified as muslim inventors? The terminology you use implies a difference and somehow exotic.
Indeed ... Arabs and Persians
OK, now I know whom to blame for my coffee addiction.
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