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Tayeb
11-07-2007, 22:06
s3 and greetings,

I'd like to share with the members a really interesting article I found on the Web, first published in "Saudi-Aramco World" magazine. It's about Rediscovering Arab/Muslim Science:

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200703/rediscovering.arabic.science.htm

An excerpt:

"Arabic/Muslim achievements in medicine were also impressive. The ninth-century Persian doctor Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, known in Latin as Rhazes, penned the first treatise on smallpox in his Kitab al-tajarib (Book of Experience), which probed some 900 cases of various maladies. Another Persian doctor, Abu Ali ibn Sina, or Avicenna (980–1037), compiled Qanun fi ’l-tib (Canon of Medicine), a five-volume compendium of Greek and Islamic healing that became one of the principal textbooks in European universities centuries later.

Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis in Latin), a 10th-century surgeon in Córdoba, composed Al-Tasrif, a 30-chapter medical encyclopedia describing dozens of operations, complete with graphic illustrations of surgical instruments, including scalpels, cauterizing tools, feeding tubes and cupping glasses. (A 15th-century Turkish edition added instructively terrifying depictions of doctors treating patients.) Some 300 years after al-Zahrawi, another Andalusian doctor, Ibn al-Baitar, published Al-jami li mufradat al-adwiyya wa l-aghdhiyya (Book of Simple Medications and Alimentations), adding more than 400 medicines and curative plants to the 1,000 catalogued by the first-century doctor Dioscorides and other Greek botanists.

Arab scholars even theorized about evolution, arriving at conclusions that anticipated Darwin. In 1377, nearly half a millennium before the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, the Tunisian-born historiographer Ibn Khaldun, renowned as one of the founders of sociology, asserted in Al-Muqaddimah (Prolegomena), “The animal kingdom was developed, its species multiplied, and in the gradual process of Creation, it ended in man & arising from the world of the monkeys.” "

For the eurocentrics this is a must read article.

Ma'a-salaama,

Netcurtains3
11-07-2007, 22:21
Tayeb,
You mentioned Darwin,
actually, at the same time as Darwin, A Catholic Monk: Gregor Mendel developed a mathematical theory of evolution that was so advanced had Darwin read it he would not have understood it. It was not until the 1920s/30s that people began to understand what an amazing chap this Mendel was. This shows you that the Muslim chaps you mention might also be under rated because no one understands them in the West.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel

From Wikipedia:

"
The significance of Mendel's work was not recognised until the turn of the 20th century. Its rediscovery prompted the foundation of genetics.
"

Tayeb
12-07-2007, 11:56
Here in Portugal and in Africa, for poor peasants education was only possible through Seminars (religious schools for novices and priests) and eventually through becoming priests. Becoming a priest can become a vocation if you are growing in such a religious environment.

Netcurtains3
12-07-2007, 22:48
....I sometimes feel that science peaked in the 1960s when man walked on the moon, we had super-sonic aeroplanes (concorde) accross the atlantic, hover-craft accross the channel and IBM system 360 computers, modern art and rock music. I think since atheists have taken over science and art not much has happened, in fact it is slowly going down hill.

John