The role of Muslim schools in societal transformation

AMS Conference 7th March 2009

The Role of our Muslim Ancestors

The Qur’an calls upon Muslims to look around them and study the physical world, so that they might appreciate the majesty of Allah’s creation.

“Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the benefit of mankind; in the rain which Allah Sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth - (Here) indeed are Signs for a people that are wise.”

Surah Al-Baqarah 2:164

And the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) told Muslims to “seek knowledge, even if it be in China.”  (Meaning ‘seek knowledge wherever it may be found.’)

Throughout Islamic history, that is exactly what Muslims have done.   Particularly in the 7th-13th centuries C.E., the Islamic world was in the midst of its “Golden Age,” paving the way for the growth of modern sciences. 

Rather than stifling science, the religion of Islam encouraged its study.  Scientific inquiry was widespread, and some of the greatest scholars and scientists of the world made wondrous discoveries and inventions.  Muslims led the world in the study of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geography, chemistry, botany, and physics.  They transmitted their studies to the West, where their work was built upon and further disseminated.

A brief overview to highlight the part played by Islamic civilization in

influencing modern ideas about science, medicine, mathematics, architecture,

music and the arts

• ‘algebra’ is derived from the Arabic term al-Jabr in the title of a book by Al-Khwarizmi. Through such works ‘Arabic numerals’, developed and enhanced from other civilisations such as the Indian, were passed on to Europe, as well as the use of the zero.

• Muslim merchants reached China in the 8th century and acquired the art of papermaking. By further developing the technique, they managed to produce paper on a large industrial scale. As the use of paper increased, vast numbers of books were produced. The industry spread further west eventually reaching Europe.

• Muslims brought chess to Spain and it spread to Western Europe. Haroon al-Rashid, the famous Muslim ruler, presented a chess set as well as one of the earliest clocks to Charlemagne.

• Botanical gardens could be found in Cordoba, Baghdad, Cairo and Fez. Numerous herbs and drugs were grown, experiments were conducted, and of course, they were places of relaxation and beauty as well.

8th Century

• Bookshops began to crop up all over Muslim lands by the 9th and 10th Centuries. The proliferation of books also meant that libraries became widespread.

• The ‘House of Wisdom’ was established in Baghdad in the 9th century, staffed by both Christian and Muslim scholars.

• The famous 9th century physician al-Razi was the first to describe smallpox, and how to distinguish it from measles. He also classified substances into mineral, vegetable and animal and was probably the first to make sulphuric acid.

• Colleges and universities became widespread in the Muslim world. Al-Azhar, established over a thousand years ago in Cairo, is one of the first such institutions.

• Surgeon al-Zahrawi was the first to develop sophisticated surgical tools for operations. He also made plaster to help broken bones heal. Al-Zahrawi developed pioneering operative techniques, including the caesarean section.

9th - 10th Centuries

• Ibn al-Haytham demonstrated that light travels in straight lines, and that we see not by our eyes throwing light onto objects but by the light reflecting off objects and entering our eye. • He devised a dark room to show that light passing through a tiny hole in one side would project an image of the object (upside down) on a white wall inside the room, thus paving the way for the camera.• His book remained the most important book on optics for over 500 years and was translated into Latin and published in 1572 as Opticae Thesaurus.Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, wrote al-Qanun Fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine. • It is still one of the most important medical books ever written. After it was translated into Latin in the 12th century it served as one of the key Medical textbooks in Europe for nearly 600 years.• Al-Biruni, a famous Muslim scholar of the 11th century, worked out that the earth is round and calculated its circumference. He also stated that the earth spins on its axis and rotates around the sun, nearly 600 years before Galileo

11th Century

• It was al-Idrisi that drew the first detailed scientific map of the world in the 12th century. He also wrote a book on the geography of the world called The Book of Roger, named after his patron, Roger the Second, the Norman King of Sicily.• Ibn Khaldun, a 14th century pioneer of history and sociology, wrote the famous Muqaddima (Introduction) one of the first detailed works on the philosophy of history. Ibn Khaldun was also known for his observations on human life and society.Muslim sailors, merchants and explorers travelled far and wide.

• In the 14th century Ibn Battuta spent 28 years of his life travelling. His journeys took him from Morocco to China.

12th - 14th Centuries

• Ulugh Beg constructed a three-storey observatory in Central Asia. The main instrument of the observatory was the Fakhri Sextant. With a radius of around 40 metres it was the largest astronomical instrument of its time. • Ulugh Beg calculated that the stellar year is 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes and 8 seconds - only 62 seconds more than the present estimation!• With the advanced instruments and mapping technology at their disposal, Muslims became experts in navigation and geography. • Among other tools they used the compass and the astrolabe (which they probably developed from the Chinese and Greeks) to chart their way around the world. • Vasco da Gama, Columbus and Magellan - all used the skills of Muslim navigators on their journeys. • This was also a golden age of architecture in the Muslim world. The Alhambra Palace in Spain in the 14th century, the Sulemaniyye Mosque built by Mimar Sinan in Istanbul in 1558, the magnificent Taj Mahal, constructed by Shah Jahan in the 17th century in India, are all examples of the splendour of Muslim architecture.

15th - 16th Centuries

• Abu Ja’far Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was born in Khwarizim, in present-day Uzbekistan• As a mathematician he is known as ‘the father of Algebra’, but he also excelled in astronomy and geography• He was appointed astronomer and mathematician by the Caliph al-Ma’mun to the greatest research institution of the time, Bayt al-Hikmah (The House of Wisdom), established by the Caliph in Baghdad.

• His most famous mathematical work is Kitab al-Mukhtasar Fi Hisab al-Jabr Wa al-Muqabalah (The Book of Summary in the Process of Calculation for Restoration and Equation).

• The word algebra is derived from the term al-Jabr in the title of the book. This was a giant leap for mankind, for without algebra modern mathematics would not have been possible.The first part of al-Khwarizmi’s book was translated

Al-Khwarizmi (770 – 850 CE)

into Latin in 1145 CE by Robert of Chester under the title Liber Algebrae et Almucabala, thereby passing the ideas, and the term itself, on to Europe.

• Perhaps an even greater contribution to Mathematics by al-Khwarizmi was the introduction of what are called the Arabic numerals, developed and enhanced from other civilisations such as the Indian, and the use of the zero. This again created a revolution in mathematics, enabling addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to be carried out significantly faster and easier than Roman numerals allowed. The use of the zero gave us the decimal system.

• The word ‘algorithm’ is derived from al-Khwarizmi’s name, and was used for centuries as the name for mathematics in many European languages. Algorithm is also used in computing to mean a logical procedure.

• Indeed, as computers work only using binary numbers, that is ones and zeros, their development would not have been possible without the introduction of the zero.

• Abu al-Qasim Ibn Abbas al-Zahrawi was born in the city of Zahra, six miles outside the city of Cordoba in Islamic Spain.

• He devoted his entire life and genius to the advancement of medicine as a whole and surgery in particular.

• He wrote a medical encyclopaedia consisting of 30 volumes covering surgery, medicine, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, pharmacology and nutrition amongst other fields of medicine.

• His most famous work was called Kitab al-Tasrif (The Book of Explanation). He excelled in the invention and use of sophisticated surgical instruments and developed pioneering operative techniques.

• Derivatives of many of his instruments are still in use in the most modern of operating theatres. He also perfected the caesarean section operation, which is so called because he named the first child he successfully delivered using this operation, Kaiser (the Arabic version of Caesar).

Al-Zahrawi (940 - 1013 CE)

• Not only was al-Zahrawi the greatest surgeon of his time, but he is also considered one of the greatest surgeons of all time, and thus is referred to as ‘the father of surgery’.Gerard of Cremona translated al-Tasrif into Latin in the 12th century and alongside Ibn Sina’s book al-Qanun Fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine) it played a major role as a medical textbook in the universities of Europe from the 12th to the 17th centuries.

• Al-Zahrawi’s book contains 200 drawings of surgical instruments; many invented by himself, ranging from a tongue depressor and a tooth extractor to a catheter and an elaborate obstetric device.

• Al-Zahrawi insisted on working ethically and warned against dubious practices adopted by some physicians for material gain. His book ends, as it begins, with the word ‘caution’. “Avoid perilous practices, as I have already warned you, so shall you have the more praise and profit if God wills.”

• Abu Ali Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham was born in Basra, established the science of Optics on new foundations and made it an organised discipline, for which he has been recognised as ‘the father of optics’.Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen.

• Wrote numerous works on optics, but his major work was Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics). For over 500 years it remained the most important book on optics, and was translated into Latin and published in 1572 as Opticae Thesaurus.

• It was most likely Ibn al-Haytham who discovered that light travels in straight lines, and that we see not by our eyes throwing light onto objects (as the Greeks had thought) but by the light reflecting off objects and entering our eye.

• In his book, he traces the functioning of the eye from the optic nerve originating in the brain to the eye itself, whose various parts, such as the conjunctiva, iris, cornea and lens he describes, pointing out the role of each in vision.

Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039 CE)

• Ibn al-Haytham first devised the camera obscura (‘al-bayt al-muzlim’ in Arabic) or ‘dark room’ to illustrate the principal that rays of light, reflected from an illuminated object will pass through a tiny hole in a dark room and project an image of the object upside down on a white wall inside the room.

• He also used this to study sunspots and other solar and lunar phenomena. It was 900 years after Ibn al-Haythams’s invention that photographic plates were first used to permanently record the image captured by the camera obscura, thus creating the modern day camera.

Al-Biruni (973 - 1051 CE)• Abu Raihan al-Biruni, born near Khwarizim, • Is considered the greatest Muslim scientist and is certainly one of the greatest intellectual figures in Islam, having mastered many disciplines.Al-Biruni was a prolific writer. • Over 180 of his books are known. His book al-Hind (India) is one of the best accounts of the Hindu religion and of the sciences and customs of India in medieval times. • Through this work, al-Biruni became known as ‘the father of the science of cultural/social anthropology’. His Chronology of Ancient Nations, dealing with the calendar and festivities of different nations is unique.Al-Biruni is regarded as the founder of geodesy (the science of earth measurement) because of the detailed and systemised studies he made of the measurements of the features of the earth’s surface. • As well as geography, al-Biruni wrote outstanding works on physics, mathematical geography, mineralogy and nearly every branch of mathematics and astronomy.

• He has been referred to as ‘the Master’. People said of him, ‘He never had a pen out of his hand, nor his eye ever off a book and his thoughts were always directed to his studies’. He wished to have a long life, not because he loved this world but because he wanted to be able to finish his work before he died.

• He was very conscious of precision in all his works and in fact his astronomical calculations were so accurate that he was nicknamed ‘the Magician’. Few combined the qualities of an outstanding scientist with that of a meticulous scholar, compiler and historian to the same degree as al-Biruni.

• However, as his works were not translated into Latin, his influence within Europe was limited.

Ibn Sina (980 - 1037 CE)• Abu Ali al-Husain Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina was born in Bukhara. Known in the West by his Latinised name, Avicenna,

• This Muslim physician became the most famous and influential of all the Muslim philosopher-scientists.

• He earned patronage from the rulers of Bukhara and Hamadan for curing illnesses that other physicians could neither diagnose nor cure.

• Ibn Sina displayed great intelligence as a child and by the age of ten had already studied the Qur’an and the Arabic classics. By the age of 16, he had studied Islamic law, philosophy, natural philosophy and Greek logic and by 18 he had built up a reputation as a physician.

• Whilst Ibn Sina is best known for his studies and practice of medicine, gaining the title ‘doctor of doctors’, he also made important contributions to philosophy, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy. His philosophical encyclopaedia, Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing) brought Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy together with Islamic theology in dividing the field of knowledge into theoretical knowledge (mathematics, physics and metaphysics) and practical knowledge (ethics, economics and politics). Ibn Sina’s most famous book, al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine) is still one of the most important medical books ever written, and served as the medical authority throughout Europe for 600 years. Gerard of Cremona translated the Canon into Latin in the 12th century and it quickly became the main textbook used in European medical schools until the 17th century, influencing the likes of Leonardo da Vinci.

• In the last 30 years of the 15th century, it went through 15 Latin editions and one Hebrew. No other medical book has remained so highly acclaimed for such a long period of time. Ibn Sina wrote almost 100 books, comprising 16 on medicine, 68 on theology and metaphysics, 11 on astronomy and 4 on poetry.

Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406 CE)• Abd al-Rahman Abu Zaid Ibn Khaldun was born, brought up and educated in Tunis. He studied the Qur’an, Arabic, hadith, fiqh and philosophy. He left Tunis at the age of 17 and went on to Fez and then to Granada and Talmisan in Islamic Spain where he held high posts.Later he went to Egypt and became the Chief Judge.

• Ibn Khaldun had a broad education, was widely read and gained rich life experiences. He excelled in jurisprudence, logic, literature and philosophy.

• From 1374, he spent four years working on his book of history called Kitab al-Ibar, the full title meaning ‘Instructive Examples and Compositions about the Origin and Elaboration of the History of the Arabs, Persians and Berbers and their Great Contemporary Rulers’.

• A monumental work of Arabic literature, it starts by explaining the value of historical work in general. It was as the writer of this introductory piece, al-Muqaddima (The Introduction) that Ibn Khaldun gained worldwide fame.

• While the Muqaddima was an introduction to the Kitab al-Ibar, it is itself considered to be a masterpiece, an ‘introduction to the very discipline of history’. The Muqaddima deals with the description and discussion of human society in its various aspects, such as nomadic and sedentary life, means of livelihood, sciences and arts, social causes and results.

• Ibn Khaldun, through a career that was continuously connected with positions of political power, developed into a keen observer of the political life of his times. His sense of observation and his philosophical and metaphysical training enabled him to become an outstanding scholar of the human sciences

Ulugh Beg (1394 - 1449 CE)• Ulugh Beg (meaning ‘great prince’) was born Muhammad Targay, the grandson of Shah Temur in Sultaniya.

• From 1409 he ruled Central Asia, the chief city of which was Samarkand. There, in 1420, he founded an educational institution (madrasah) in which astronomy was the most important subject. He personally interviewed and selected all the lecturers who taught there to determine their knowledge and their qualifications.

• Four years after founding the madrasah, Ulugh Beg constructed a three-storey observatory for solar observations in general, and for observations of the moon and planets in particular. The main instrument of the observatory was the Fakhri Sextant, which had a radius of around 40 metres, making it the largest astronomical instrument of its type in the world. The observations made by Ulugh Beg were very advanced for his time and surprisingly accurate. His calculation that the stellar year is 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes and 8 seconds, is remarkable as it is only 62 seconds more than the present estimation.

• Ulugh Beg assembled the best-known mathematicians of his day in the observatory, and equipped it with the finest instruments available. Among the mathematicians was Ghiyath al-Din al-Kashani, whose mastery of the theory of numbers was unmatched until fairly recent times.

• An important result of the work of Ulugh Beg was the astronomical tables called the Zij of Ulugh Beg. This includes tables of calendar calculations, of trigonometry, and of the planets, as a well as a star catalogue. The observatory was later reduced to ruins but was rediscovered by the archaeologist VL Vyatkin in 1908.

Muslims have produced a great number of scientists and scholars Jabir Ibn Haiyan died 803 Mohammad Bin Musa al-Khawarizmi died 840 Yaqub Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi 800 Thabit Ibn Qurra 836 Ali Ibn Rabban al-Tabari 838 Abu Abdullah al-Battani 858 Al-Farghani 860 Mohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi 864 Abu al-Nasr al-Farabi 870 Abul Hasan Ali al-Masu’di died 957 Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi 936 (see also) Abul Wafa Muhammad al-Buzjani 940 Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham 965

Abu al-Hasan al-Mawardi 972Abu Raihan al-Biruni 973 Ibn Sina 980 Omar al-Khayyam 1044Abu Hamid al-Ghazali 1058Abu Marwan Ibn Zuhr 1091Al-Idrisi 1099Ibn Rushd 1128Ibn al-Baitar died 1248Nasir al-Din al-Tusi 1201Jalal al-Din Rumi 1207Ibn al-Nafis 1213Ibn Khaldun 1332

These English words are rooted in the Arabic language, demonstrating the influence of Muslim scholars in these fields:

alchemy

algebra

algorithm

alkali

almanac

antimony

average

azimuth

camphor

carat

cipher (zero)

elixir

nadir

pancreas

soda

zenith

zircon

Arabic Words used in English

abutilon acequia admiral adobe afrit aladdin albacore albatross alborak alcalde alcazar alchemy alcor alcove aldebaran alembic alfalfa alforja algarroba algebra algol algorithm alhambra ali baba

alidade alizarin alkali alkanet almagest almanac amalgam amber anil antimony apricot arak arroba arsenal artichoke assegai attar azimuth azoth azure balas barbary barberry bard

bedouin benzoin betelgeuse bezoar blighty bonito borax bougie buckram burgoo calibre camel camphor candy carafe carat caraway cipher coffee cotton crimson damascene

dragoman durra elemi elixir fakir falafel fardel fellah felucca fennec gazelle gerbil ghoul gibraltar giraffe guitar hajji halal halvah hammam harem hazard henna imam jar jasmine jemadar jennet

jerboa jinnee julep kat kebab khamsin kismet kohl lemon lilac lime loofah lute macrammagazine marabout marcasite marzipan mastaba mattress

mezereum mihrab minaret mohair monsoon mosque mozarab mummy muslin nadir noria nucha ogive olibanum orange oud pia mater rahat lokum ramadan rambla

razzia realgar ream rigel rook ryot safari saffron sahara saice sash satin scarlet senna sequin sesame sheikh sherbet soda sofa souk spinach sugar sumac summit

swahili syrup tabby tabla tahina taj mahal talc talisman tamarind tambourine tare tariff tarragon trafalgar trona vega vizier zarf zedoary zenith zero

So what happened?

The Islamic world hit the peak of its “Golden Age,” and then Muslims fell into their own Dark Age. 

Some say the fall coincided with the Crusades and the devastation of the Mongol invasion, when thousands of libraries and books were destroyed, and hundreds of scholars and scientists were murdered.   Others point to internal division within Muslim society as the main cause.

The role of Muslim schools in societal transformation

• If one is to understand others, one must first know oneself. To give children and young people an accurate view of the world, education, one must first help them to discover who they are.

• Developing such empathy at school, bears fruit in terms of social behavior throughout life.

• Schools play a vital role in preparing our children and young people for effective participation and responsible citizenship. As such, schools are uniquely placed to contribute towards the development of a just and harmonious society.

• Schools have a responsibility to provide an inclusive working and learning environment that affords all students and staff the opportunity to achieve their full potential. They must also respond to the specific needs of students, staff and community from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

• Finally, they are responsible for preparing students to contribute towards the development of a just society.