Islamic Inventions were Roman, Greek and Persian.
"According to conventional wisdom Islam was a civilized and enlightened creed during the Dark Ages, while the Christian world was wallowing in depravity and ignorance. Islam was, therefore, the guardian and savior of all ancient science, knowledge and wisdom.
But that is not true in the slightest. Islam took over many highly educated and highly advanced regions of the Byzantine Empire, at the point of the sword, and forced whole populations to convert to Islam. There were many sects in those times, just like the Alawi, Alevi, Ahmadiyya, Sui, Druze and Ishmailis of the modern era, who adopted a cloak of Islam to avoid persecution and death. Those who refused to change their beliefs were forced to live as dhimmis - they were effectively reduced to serfdom in their own lands... Even in supposedly modern and Westernised Turkey, a friend of many years whispered that he was not really Muslim but had to say that he was to keep his job. He made me swear not to tell anyone, that his family had been secret Christians for generations.
So the lands of the East were not majority Muslim at all, during the Dark and Middle Ages. In fact many regions, like Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Anatolia, were not majority Muslim until comparatively recently. They were controlled and oppressed by Muslim overlords, that is for sure, but none of these lands were majority Muslim. Furthermore, because Muslim education concentrates on religious studies, and because most Muslims spoke Arabic, Eastern academia was largely run by Syriac Christians. The language of science was Greek while the lingua franca of the East was Aramaic; and the only people who spoke Greek, Aramaic and Arabic were the Syriac Christians.
In addition, most of science is haram to Muslims. The Koran is sacrosanct and inviolable, and yet the Koran teaches that the Sun orbits the Earth and sinks into a muddy pool over the horizon; so strict adherents to Islam were never going to make good freethinking scientists. Thus time and time again, if we look at the lives of supposed Muslim scientists and inventors, it will be seen that they were actually making their discoveries and advances despite Islam, not because of it. Omar Khayyam, for instance, the great Muslim mathematician and poet, was actually a Sui Agnostic:
From his youth to his death Khayyam remained a materialist, a pessimist, and an Agnostic. Khayyam looked at all religions questions with a skeptical eye, and hated the fanaticism, narrow-mindedness, and the spirit of vengeance of the mullahs.
And Khayyam himself once said:
We are the victims of an age when men of science are discredited, and only a few remain who are capable of engaging in scientiic research. Our philosophers spend all their time in mixing true with false and are interested in nothing but outward show; such little learning as they have they extend on material ends. When they see a man sincere and unremitting in his search for the truth, one who will have nothing to do with falsehood and pretence, they mock and despise him.
In Khayyam’s day, to challenge the veracity of the Koran and to deny many of its core teachings was a deadly path to tread. The punishment for Islamic apostasy was death - just as it still is today. Which is probably why Khayyam’s advice was to live life one day at a time, in case the Dark Force caught up with you; and so he invariably settled down to enjoy his women and wine...
Nevertheless, despite the well-known vacuous nature of Islamic science, an enterprising exhibition has been touring the museums of the world, promoting the virtues of Islamic inventions. It is called 1,001 Islamic Inventions and has been put together by Abdul Latif Jameel, a Saudi Arabian car importer, and it seeks to extol the remarkable and indispensable contribution that Islamic inventions have made to civilisation and to the betterment of mankind. The tour’s website is keen to note the many endorsements and praise given by the sycophantic Western media, especially the UK’s left- leaning Independent newspaper. Yet these enthusiastic endorsements by seemingly knowledgeable media outlets will obviously inluence the foolish and the ignorant, which is why we see the likes of the president of the USA aping these claims as if they were proven fact...
The magnetic compass was actually discovered by the Chinese, who had been playing with magnets since the 4th century BC, as, indeed, had Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century AD. We know that the Chinese were using the magnetic compass for navigation by the 12th century AD, if not before, more than a century before the lands of Islam borrowed the device.
And as to Islam giving us timeless poetry and cherished music, we should not forget that Muhummad himself had a loathing of poets and bells, and put many poets to death for the satirical verses they created. The roll- call of the Dead Poet’s Society, poets that Muhummad himself ordered to be murdered, include Al Nadr bin al Harith, Uqbah bin Abu Muayt, Asma bint Marwan, Kab bin al Ashraf, and a poor one-eyed Bedouin who happened to sing the wrong song to the wrong people...
1. Coffee. Rather than being a Muslim beverage, the first usage of coffee as a stimulant drink is thought to have been Ethiopian...
2. Photography. The Independent newspaper said that the term camera obscura comes from the Arabic qamara referring to a dark room. But this is complete nonsense. In reality, the phrase comes directly from the Latin, where a ‘dark room’ is called a camera obscura... the Chinese philosopher Mozi knew about the camera obscura in the 5th century BC, as did the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC...
4. Flight. The first kites were actually invented in China as far back as the 8th century BC...
5. Soap. Rather than being a Muslim invention, soap was recorded in Babylonian texts going back as far as the third millennium BC...
6. Distillation. One might initially wonder why a good Muslim would be inventing an alcohol distillation apparatus. Anyway, even if Jabir ibn Hayyan was indeed fond of his strong liquor, the process was not invented by him, for distillation was well known to the Greeks...
16. Carpets. How anyone can say that carpets were an Islamic invention is beyond comprehension... the image in ig 9 is of the Pazyryk Carpet from the Pazyryk burial mound in Siberia, and it dates from the 5th century BC. Not only is this a true pile carpet, but it is a very intricate carpet, which demonstrates that this manufacturing technique had already had a long and illustrious history prior to this time...
18. The spherical earth. Again, it is a gross and highly irresponsible distortion of historical reality to claim that Islam discovered the spherical Earth. Even within classical history it is well understood that the ancient Greeks knew the Earth to be spherical. Not only that, but Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference in the 3rd century BC, long before Islam was invented, and he nearly got the right answer too...
19. Gunpowder. According to the Independent’s cerebrally challenged reporter, although the Chinese invented gunpowder it was left to our hero Islamists to ‘refine the formula by adding potassium nitrate for military use’! It is difficult to know what to say about this statement, apart from ‘never trust anything the Independent newspaper says’, or better still, ‘never buy the Independent’.
Gunpowder was invented by the Chinese in about the 9th century AD, and by the 11th century rockets and fireworks were being manufactured...
20. Gardens. According to this exhibition of inventions and to the Independent newspaper, it was Muslims who irst developed the ornamental garden as a place of beauty and meditation. Again this is sycophantic drivel...
Undoubtedly the majority of wealthy civilisations have at some point discovered the delights of bringing a tamed and cultured countryside into the city, and the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon would surely have been one formal garden that even the dimmest of Independent reporters could have recalled (fig 11). However, if we travel a little further west and a little further back in time, we ind that the Egyptians also had pleasure gardens for the royalty and aristocracy. The gardens of Pharaoh Akhenaton at Amarna would have been known as the Garden of the Aten (Aden), and were probably the origin of the legend of the Garden of Eden (Aden). See the book Eden in Egypt for further details...
This low number of Muslim Nobel laureates is not due to any lack of populations, nor due to a lack of wealth. The oil rich Middle East sports any number of richly sponsored universities and Saudi Arabia spends billions of dollars on sponsoring madrassas across the Islamic world. However, most of those madrassas only teach students Arabic and the Koran until they are eleven years old, so it is not surprising that they struggle with mathematics and science at a later point in their education."
