Ibn
Khaldun and the Rise and Fall of Empires
Caroline
Stone
The 14th-century
historiographer and historian Abu Zayd 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun
was a brilliant scholar and thinker now viewed as a founder of modern
historiography, sociology and economics. Living in one of human
kind's most turbulent centuries, he observed at first hand, or
participated in, such decisive events as the birth of new states,
the disintegration of the Muslim Andalus and the advance of the
Christian reconquest, the Hundred Years' War, the expansion of
the Ottoman Empire, the decline of Byzantium and the epidemic of
the Black Death. Considered by modern critics as the thinker that
conceived and created a philosophy of history that was
undoubtedly one of the greatests works ever created by a man of
intelligence, so groundbreaking were his ideas, and so far ahead
of his time, that his writings are taken as a lens through which
to view not only his own time but the relations between Europe
and the Muslim world in our own time as well.
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One
Thousand Years of Missing History
Professor Salim
T S Al-Hassani
The following essay
aims to alert communities as to the particular significance of
the Muslim civilisation and its historical role in contributing
to the birth of modern civilisation. The author, Professor Salim
Al-Hassani, a specialist of Muslim Heritage and a pioneer of its
defense, focuses first on various instances of distorted history
in scholarship, school curricula and media culture. He shows how
unjustified is the suppression of centuries of history from
history books and how the jump from Hellenistic times to
Renaissance is rather the manifestation of ignorance and
misconceptions. Presenting selected examples, he then proves that
this suppressed period, belonging to the classical period of the
history of Islam, and which lasted for about a millennium, knew a
creative contribution to civilisation by men and women of
different faiths. Those knowledge, science and art creators built
on ancient knowledge and were the drive of one of the richest
periods of history in terms of science, culture, technology and
art.
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Abu
al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi the Great Surgeon
Dr.
Ibrahim Shaikh
Abu al-Qasim Khalaf
ibn al-Abbas Al-Zahrawi (936-1013 CE), also known in the West as
Albucasis, was an Andalusian physician. He is considered as the
greatest surgeon in the Islamic medical tradition. His
comprehensive medical texts, combining Middle Eastern and
Greco-Roman classical teachings, shaped European surgical
procedures up until the Renaissance. His greatest contribution to
history is Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume collection of medical
practice, of which large portions were translated into Latin and
in other European languages.
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Al-Muqaddasi
and Human Geography: An Early Contribution to Social Sciences
FSTC
Research Team
Recent scholarly
interest in the genesis of social sciences in Islamic culture is
a noteworthy shift. Until recent times, the development of these
fields was credited exclusively to the modern Western tradition,
especially to the 19th century birth of humanities. The ground
breaking contribution of Ibn Khaldun was recognized; however, the
author of the Muqaddima stands as an isolated genius. In the
following article, an attempt is made to broaden the field by
highlighting the contributions of several other scholars in
laying the foundation of social sciences in Islamic culture.
After a short survey on Al-Biruni and Al-Raghib al-Isfahani, the
focus of the article is dedicated to the 10th-century Palestinian
geographer Al-Muqaddasi, who touched on various subjects of
interest to the social sciences in his book Ahsan
al-taqasim fi ma'rifat al-aqalim.
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Piri
Reis: A Genius 16th-Century Ottoman Cartographer and Navigator
FSTC
Research Team
Piri Reis is a well
known Ottoman-Turkish admiral, geographer and cartographer from
the 16th century. His famous world map compiled in 1513 and
discovered in 1929 at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul is the oldest
known Turkish map showing the New World, and one of the oldest
maps of America still in existence. The half of the map which
survives shows the western coasts of Europe and North Africa and
the coast of Brazil with reasonable accuracy in addition to
various Atlantic islands including the Azores and Canary Islands.
This article presents the achievements of Piri Reis in
cartography through the analysis of the surviving partial
versions of his two world maps and his book of navigation, the
Kitab-i Bahriye.
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Dam
Construction in the Islamic Civil Engineering
FSTC
Research Team
Dams are required in
most hydraulic systems, for irrigation, regulating flow of rivers
and in modern times for the production of energy. In the
classical Islamic world, dam construction received a special attention
as an integral part of large civil engineering works. Since the
Umayyad Caliphate, dams were built in different Islamic regions.
This article is a survey presenting the tradition of dam
construction by Muslims, characterized by a rich variety of structures
and forms.
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Using an
Astrolabe
Emily
Winterburn
The history of the
astrolabe begins more than two thousand years ago, but it is in
the Islamic classical world that the astrolabe was highly
developed and its uses widely multiplied. Introduced to Europe
from Islamic Spain in the early 12th century, it was one of the
major astronomical instruments until the modern times. In this
concise and beautifully illustrated article, Emily Winterburn
casts a short story of the Islamic art of making astrolabes –
developing the different varieties, the description of their
structure and parts and their uses in social, religious and
scientific functions.
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Islamic
Automation: Al-Jazari's Book of Knowledge of Ingenious
Mechanical Devices
Dr.
Gunalan Nadarajan
In the following
essay, Dr. Gunalan Nadarajan, Associate Dean of Research and
Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn
State University, draws on the work of al-Jazari, the famous 13th
century Islamic scholar, engineer and scientist, to develop an
alternative history of robotics. The work of Al-Jazari is
considered as a significant contribution to the history of
robotics and automation insofar as it enables a critical
re-evaluation of classical notions and the conventional history of
automation and therefore of robotics. In his analysis, the author
details the notion of "Islamic automation", where the
notions of control that have informed the conventional history of
automation and robotics are substituted by subordination and
submission to the rhythms of the machines.
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Creating
a 3D Model with Motion Analysis of Taqi al-Din's Six-Cylinder
Pump
Joseph
Vera
Among the original
machines described in the corpus of Islamic technology, the
six-cylinder "monobloc" piston pump designed by Taqi
al-Din Ibn Ma'ruf in the late 16th century holds
a special place. Working as a suction pump, this complex machine
included components that are often associated with modern
technology, such as a camshaft, a cylinder block, pistons, and
non-return valves. In this article, Joseph Vera, an expert in
re-engineering ancient inventions, describes how he created a
SolidWorks CAD model of this remarkable pump, that he completed
with a motion simulation. The conclusion he drew after creating
the model and the simulation is that the engineers of the Islamic
tradition, represented by Taqi al-Din, had a very solid grasp of
kinematics, dynamics and fluid mechanics. He notes also that Taqi
al-Din's "monobloc" pump is a remarkable example of a
machine using renewable energy, a topic that is currently of
utmost importance.
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