Lisbon Treaty Referendum: Is the European Union an example for the Islamic World?

Paul Vallely 

From
coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given
us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new
exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential-
and identifies the men of genius behind them

taken from: http://www.independ ent.co.uk/ news/science/ how-islamic- inventors- changed-the- world-469452. html

1
The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the
Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia , when he noticed his animals became
livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make
the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans
exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all
night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had
arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in
1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee
who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of
London . The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian
caffé and then English coffee.

2
The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which
enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the
eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician,
astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole
camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window
shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out,
and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a
dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to
shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.

3
A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed
into the form we know it today in Persia . From there it spread
westward to Europe – where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in
the 10th century – and eastward as far as Japan . The word rook comes
from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.

4
A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer,
musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to
construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the
Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden
struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn’t. But the cloak slowed
his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and
leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected
a machine of silk and eagles’ feathers he tried again, jumping from a
mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten
minutes but crashed on landing – concluding, correctly, that it was
because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on
landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are
named after him.

5 Washing
and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps
why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. The
ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans who used it
more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with
sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil. One of the Crusaders’
most striking characteristics, to Arab nostrils, was that they did not
wash. Shampoo was introduced to England by a Muslim who opened
Mahomed’s Indian Vapour Baths on Brighton seafront in 1759 and was
appointed Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.

6 Distillation,
the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling
points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam’s foremost scientist,
Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing
many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today –
liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation,
evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric
acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater
and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is
haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic
experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.

7
The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion
and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least
the internal combustion engine. One of the most important mechanical
inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by an ingenious
Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. His
1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also
invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of the
first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights, and was the father
of robotics. Among his 50 other inventions was the combination lock.

8
Quiltin
g 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. Muslims 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-representationa l 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
befor
e 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.

www.1001inventions. com.

German courtroom killer allegedly driven by hate of Muslims

	Thousands of Egyptians surround the coffin of a 32-year old pregnant woman who was stabbed to death in Germany as she was about to testify against a man who allegedly called her an Islamist.
Nasser Nouri / AP

CAIRO
– Egyptians are horrified by the brutal slaying of a pregnant Muslim
woman stabbed repeatedly inside a German courtroom, calling what they
see as a lack of outrage in Germany evidence of racism and anti-Islamic
sentiment.

On
Monday, thousands of mourners marched behind the coffin of Marwa
al-Sherbini, 32, in her Mediterranean hometown of Alexandria where her
body was buried after being flown back from Germany.

“There
is no god but God and the Germans are the enemies of God,” chanted the
mourners, while others carried banners condemning racism. Her brother Tarek el-Sherbini told The
Associated Press by telephone from the mosque where prayers were being
recited in front of his sister’s coffin. “In the West, they don’t
recognize us. There is racism.”

Courtroom erupts into violence
Al-Sherbini,
who was about four months pregnant, was involved in a court case
against her neighbor for calling her a terrorist and was set to testify
against him when he stabbed her 18 times inside the courtroom in front
of her 3-year-old son.

Her
husband, who was in Germany on a research fellowship, came to her aid
and was also stabbed by the neighbor and shot in the leg by a security
guard who initially mistook him for the attacker, German prosecutors
said. He is now in critical condition in a German hospital, according
to al-Sherbini’s brother.

“The
guards thought that as long as he wasn’t blond, he must be the attacker
so they shot him,” al-Sherbini told an Egyptian television station.

The
man, who has only been identified as 28-year-old Alex W., remains in
detention and prosecutors have opened an investigation on suspicion of
murder.

Driven by a deep hatred
Christian
Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden where the incident took place,
described the killer as driven by a deep hatred of Muslims. “It was
very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf.”

He
added that the attacker was a Russian of German descent who had
immigrated to Germany in 2003 and had expressed his contempt for
Muslims at the start of the trial.

At
its regular news conference on Monday, a German government spokesman
Thomas Steg said if the attack was racist, the government “naturally
condemns this in the strongest terms.”

The
killing has dominated Egyptian media for days, while it has received
comparatively little coverage in German and Western media.

‘Meager’ response from government, media
A German Muslim group criticized government officials and the media for not paying enough attention to the crime.

“The
incident in Dresden had anti-Islamic motives. So far, the reactions
from politicians and media have been incomprehensibly meager,” Aiman
Mazyek, the general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims, told
Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily.

Egyptian
commentators said the incident was an example of how hate crimes
against Muslims are overlooked in comparison to hate crimes committed
by Muslims against Westerners. Many commentators pointed to the uproar
that followed the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a
Dutch-born Islamic fundamentalist angry over one of his films
criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.

Abdel
Azeem Hamad, chief editor of the independent Egyptian daily el-Shorouk,
said that if the victim had been a Jew, there would be have been in an
uproar.

“What we
demand is just some attention to be given to the killing of a young
innocent mother on the hands of fanatic extremist,” he wrote in his
column.

An Egyptian blogger Hicham Maged, wrote “let us play the ‘What If’ game.”

“Just
imagine if the situation was reversed and the victim was a Westerner
who was stabbed anywhere in the world or — God forbid — in any Middle
Eastern country by Muslim extremists,” he said.

The Egyptian Pharmacists’ Association called for a boycott of German drugs.

According
to numerous interviews in Egyptian local papers with el-Sherbini
family, the man who stabbed al-Sherbini used to accuse her of being a
“terrorist,” and in one incident, he tried to take off her headscarf.

Victim couldn’t find work
Laila
Shams, al-Sherbini’s mother, told the el-Wafd daily that her daughter
said she’d difficulty finding a job in Germany because of her head
scarf.

“One (employer) suggested she remove her head scarf to get a job. She said no,” she said.

Officials
from a German Muslim group and the country’s main Jewish group made a
joint visit Monday to the Dresden hospital where the victim’s husband
is being treated.

“You don’t have to be a Muslim to act against anti-Muslim behavior, and
you don’t have to be a Jew to act against anti-Semitism,” said Stephan
Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.

Israeli border police officer, masked plainclothes police officers detain Palestinian youth during clashes in east Jerusalem, 5 Oct 2009

Israel has deployed thousands of police around Jerusalem’s Old City,
following several recent clashes between Jews and Palestinian Muslims
at the compound that houses sites holy to both groups.  

Israeli
police deployed thousands of additional officers at entrances to the
Old City leading to the compound containing the Al Aqsa mosque – sacred
to Muslims and the Western Wall – Judaism’s holiest site.

Clashes
have erupted during the past week between Muslims and Jewish
worshippers, fueled largely by rumors that Jews were planning to storm
the compound.

Israel national police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld
says Monday was especially sensitive as 30,000 Jewish worshippers
approached the compound – known to Jews as the Temple Mount – at the
start of the week-long Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

“The Temple
Mount was open to Muslims that wanted to come and pray only from the
age of 50 upwards, and women of all ages,” Rosenfeld explained. “This
was necessary to prevent any disturbances from taking place on the
Temple Mount.”

Among those prevented from approaching the area
was 36-year-old Dmitri Diliani, a member of the Revolutionary Council
of the ruling Palestinian Fatah faction of Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas.  

“This is pure provocation of the Palestinian people since this is one of the holiest Muslim sites,” Diliani said.

Diliani,
a Christian, serves as the Fatah spokesman for Jerusalem. He told VOA
that Fatah is encouraging Palestinian Muslims to resist what he views
as Jewish efforts to take over the compound.

“Fatah stands at
a point where it will continue to organize the process of defending the
holy sites through popular effort and grass-roots mobilization,” he
said.

Monday saw mobilization by Palestinians against their own
leadership, as anger mounts over a decision by the government of
President Abbas to suspend efforts to bring war crimes charges against
Israeli officials involved in the assault on militants in the Gaza
Strip 10 months ago.

Hundreds of Palestinians protested
peacefully in the West Bank town of Ramallah near Jerusalem. The
protesters included Mustafa Barghouthi, a prominent commentator, who
said the Palestinian leaders’ decision showed little regard for the
people they represent.  

“They lack the ability to have
collective decision,” Barghouthi said. “There was no consultation and
I think they made a grave mistake against the interests of their own
people.”

Israel says it will maintain heightened security in Jerusalem until the tension around the holy sites subsides.  

In
2000, confrontations at the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Western
Wall sparked a bloody, Palestinian uprising known as the Second
Intifada, which lasted for several years. 

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