Islamic Faith and Innovations:

Faith | Innovations

Faith:
Koran and Tradition

The two foundations of Muslim faith are God's revelations to Muhammad, known as the Koran, from the Arabic word Qur'an, or "recitation"; and the reports about Muhammad's life and deeds, which are known as the hadith, from the Arabic word for "report." The central miracle of Islam is God's revelation to Muhammad, whose human fallibilities as a mere mortal are repeatedly mentioned in the Koran.

The revelations that comprise the Koran were revealed over a period of more than two decades in two places. The first revelations from the period of Muhammad's residence in Mecca are short and incantatory verses of extraordinary poetic beauty. The later revelations from the period after Muhammad immigrated to Medina are longer, legalistic texts appropriate to a developing community of believers in need of rules and regulations.

Muhammad and his followers initially committed the revelations to memory, but as these revelations grew in number and complexity, some were probably written down on whatever materials were at hand. After the Prophet died, his followers were pressed to preserve the purity of the revelations and began to write down as many of them as possible. According to the traditional view, a uniform written text of the revelations to Muhammad was collected and collated some twenty years after his death.

The Koran as a book is comparable in length to the Gospels. It contains 114 chapters (each called in Arabic a sura) of varying length. It opens with the Fatiha, a beautiful short prayer that serves as an invocation in many situations;

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
Praise belongs to God, Lord of all Being
the All-merciful, the All-compassionate
the Master of the Day of Doom
Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succor
Guide us in the straight path
the path of those whom Thou hast blessed,
not of those against whom Thou art wrathful
nor of those who are astray.
The other chapters of the Koran follow in descending order of length, from the 286 verses of the second chapter, known as "The Cow," to the final two chapters, which are short prayers of a few lines. The chapters are thus arranged neither in the order in which the verses were revealed nor in a narrative sequence.

The Koran, as God's literal word, can only be comprehended in the majestic and glorious Arabic language in which it was revealed. The necessity of reading the Koran in Arabic has meant that all believers should learn the language in order to understand the scriptures. This requirement has created a linguistic bond among believers, particularly as Islam spread beyond the boundaries of Arabia to regions inhabited by speakers of other languages. Having learned to use Arabic as the language of religion, the new converts also used it as a language of literature, science, commerce and social intercourse.

The primacy of Arabic as the language of God's revelation has also helped to preserve the purity of the Arabic language, for Muslims constantly call to mind the noble and magnificent words and phrases of the Koran. Although the Arabic language has evolved over the fourteen centuries since the Koran was revealed, it has not changed as much as English has changed in the six centuries since the time of Chaucer. Finally, the primacy of the Arabic language has encouraged the spread and use of the Arabic script, which is known and used from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific to render a variety of languages, including Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Kashmiri, Urdu, Sindhi, Ottoman Turkish, Chaghatay, and Malay.

The second basis of Muslim faith is the example of the Prophet. As the perfect Muslim, Muhammad served and still serves as the model for all believers. His sayings and deeds were remembered by his associates and preserved in the Traditions, known in Arabic as hadith. These Traditions normally take the form of a chain ("So-and-so heard from so-and-so, who heard from so-and-so, that the Prophet said [or did]"), followed by a report of what the Prophet said or did.

The Traditions came to be considered second in authority to the Koran and also help explain and elaborate the circumstances under which obscure passages in the Koran were revealed. The Traditions were transmitted orally for several generations before being written down, beginning in the eighth century. By the ninth century the jurist al-Shafii (d. 820) came to consider the sunna, or custom of the Prophet, the second most important root of Islamic jurisprudence after the Koran. Together the Koran and the Traditions, along with consensus and analogy, make up the sharia, the rules and regulations that govern the day-to-day lives of Muslims.


Innovation:
Algebra and Trigonometry:

Medieval Muslims made invaluable contributions to the study of mathematics, and their key role is clear from the many terms derived from Arabic. Perhaps the most famous mathematician was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 800-ca. 847), author of several treatises of earth-shattering importance. His book On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, written about 825, was principally responsible for the diffusion of the Indian system of numeration (Arabic numerals) in the Islamic lands and the West.

Traditional systems had used different letters of the alphabet to represent numbers or cumbersome Roman numerals, and the new system was far superior, for it allowed people to multiply and divide easily and check their work. The merchant Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, who had learned about Arabic numerals in Tunis, wrote a treatise rejecting the abacus in favor of the Arab method of reckoning, and as a result, the system of Hindu-Arabic numeration caught on quickly in Central Italy. By the fourteenth century, Italian merchants and bankers had abandoned the abacus and were doing their calculations using pen and paper, in much the same way we do today.

In addition to his treatise on numerals, al-Khwarizmi also wrote a revolutionary book on resolving quadratic equations. These were given either as geometric demonstrations or as numerical proofs in an entirely new mode of expression. The book was soon translated into Latin, and the word in its title, al-jabr, or transposition, gave the entire process its name in European languages, algebra, understood today as the generalization of arithmetic in which symbols, usually letters of the alphabet such as A, B, and C, represent numbers. Al-Khwarizmi had used the Arabic word for "thing" (shay) to refer to the quantity sought, the unknown. When al-Khwarizmi's work was translated in Spain, the Arabic word shay was transcribed as xay, since the letter x was pronounced as sh in Spain. In time this word was abbreviated as x, the universal algebraic symbol for the unknown.

Robert of Chester's translation of al-Khwarzmi's treatise on algebra opens with the words dixit Algorithmi, "Algorithmi says." In time, the mathematician's epithet of his Central Asian origin, al-Khwarizmi, came in the West to denote first the new process of reckoning with Hindu-Arabic numerals, algorithmus, and then the entire step-by-step process of solving mathematical problems, algorithm.

Engineering:

Medieval Muslim scientists often focused on practical matters, particularly hydraulic engineering, as water was always a precious resource in the arid lands where Islam traditionally flourished. Engineers designed various kinds of water-raising machines, some powered by animals, others powered by rivers and streams. The waterwheels along the Orontes River in Syria were used to irrigate until modern times. Watermills were used to grind corn and other grains, though in Iran water power was often supplemented or replaced by wind.

Bridges and dams were needed to channel water. In addition to the standard beam, cantilever and arch bridges, engineers also designed bridges of boats to span rivers. Dams were widely used to divert rivers into irrigation canals. Perhaps the most ingenious hydraulic technologies were the distribution networks of canals and qanats, subterranean aqueducts that sometimes carried water for hundreds of miles. Cisterns and underground ice-houses were used for storage. Various instruments were used to measure water flow, and the Nilometer built in 861-62 still stands on Rawda Island in Cairo.

In addition to these machines and technologies related to water, Muslim engineers also designed several types of siege engines, notably the traction and the counterweight trebuchet. Their ingenuity is clear from the many kinds of fine machines they also perfected, ranging from clocks and automata to fountains. Some were meant for practical purposes but others were designed for amusement or aesthetic enjoyment, and their components and techniques were of great importance for the development of machine technology.

Astronomy:

As in the other sciences, astronomers in the Muslim lands built upon and greatly expanded earlier traditions. At the House of Knowledge founded in Baghdad by the Abbasid caliph Mamun, scientists translated many texts from Sanskrit, Pahlavi or Old Persian, Greek and Syriac into Arabic, notably the great Sanskrit astronomical tables and Ptolemy's astronomical treatise, the Almagest. Muslim astronomers accepted the geometrical structure of the universe expounded by Ptolemy, in which the earth rests motionless near the center of a series of eight spheres, which encompass it, but then faced the problem of reconciling the theoretical model with Aristotelian physics and physical realities derived from observation.

Some of the most impressive efforts to modify Ptolemaic theory were made at the observatory founded by Nasir al-Din Tusi in 1257 at Maragha in northwestern Iran and continued by his successors at Tabriz and Damascus. With the assistance of Chinese colleagues, Muslim astronomers worked out planetary models that depended solely on combinations of uniform circular motions. The astronomical tables compiled at Maragha served as a model for later Muslim astronomical efforts. The most famous imitator was the observatory founded in 1420 by the Timurid prince Ulughbeg at Samarkand in Central Asia, where the astronomer Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid al-Kashi worked out his own set of astronomical tables, with sections on diverse computations and eras, the knowledge of time, the course of the stars, and the position of the fixed stars. Essentially Ptolemaic, these tables have improved parameters and structure as well as additional material on the Chinese Uighur-calendar. They were widely admired and translated even as far away as England, where John Greaves, professor at Oxford, called attention to them in 1665.

Medicine:

Medieval Muslims revolutionized the science and practice of medicine, as physicians began to question the medical traditions inherited from both East and West and distinguish one disease from another. For example, Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965-1039), the so-called "father of optics," explained how human vision takes place by integrating physical, mathematical, experimental, physiological, and psychological considerations. His treatise had an enormous impact on all later writers on optics, both in the Muslim world and through a medieval Latin translation in the West. Similarly, the great Egyptian physician Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288), discovered the minor, or pulmonary, circulation of the blood. Ibn Sina (980-1037), known in the West as Avicenna, synthesized Aristotelian and later Greek theories with his own original views, and his Canon of Medicine became the most famous medical book in the East or West, translated at least 87 times.

Muslims also expanded the practice of medical schools and hospitals. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid used the Sasanian academy of Jundishapur in southwestern Iran as his model when he founded his own hospital in Baghdad (ca. 800). Hospitals were soon established throughout the empire. They were staffed by dozens of specialists, from physiologists, oculists, and surgeons, to bonesetters. They even had special wards for the mentally ill and separate wings for men and women. These hospitals were often incorporated into large charitable foundations and were supported by endowments made by powerful and wealthy individuals. One of the most famous was that founded by the Mamluk sultan Qalawun in Cairo. In addition, traveling clinics and dispensaries provided services to rural areas.

Paper & Publishing:

Muslims were responsible for the transfer of papermaking from China, where it had been invented in the centuries before Christ, to Europe, where it fueled the print revolution in the late fifteenth century. Muslims encountered paper when they conquered Central Asia in the eighth century. Paper quickly supplanted papyrus (which was made only in Egypt) and parchment (which was made from animal skins), for it could be made virtually anywhere from rags and waste fibers. Although it was not cheap, paper had the great advantage of being difficult to erase, an important consideration when documents and records had to be secure from forgery. The use of paper soon spread from government offices to all segments of society. By the middle of the ninth century the Papersellers' Street in Baghdad had more than one hundred shops in which paper and books were sold.

Medieval Islamic society had a paper economy, where both wholesale and retail merchants conducted commerce on credit. Orders of payment, the equivalent of modern checks (the Persian word sakk is the origin of our word "check"), were drawn in amounts upwards from one dinar (a gold coin roughly equivalent to half a month's salary). By the ninth century paper was used for copying scientific and other types of utilitarian texts, although it took longer for Muslims to accept the use of paper as a fitting support for God's word. The first paper manuscript of the Koran to survive dates from 972, but from this date paper soon became standard for all books. Medieval Islamic libraries had hundreds of thousands of volumes far outstripping the relatively small monastic and university libraries in the West.