The World Environment Day, celebrated annually since 1972, has grown to become one of the main vehicles through which the United Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and encourages political attention and action.
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Feature Stories
Ibn Sina’s ‘Canon’ book, a medical reference in Europe for 500 years!
Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, lived in Hamadan and Jurjan from 980 to 1037 CE, and acquired great fame in mediaeval European medicine. His encyclopaedic book Al Qanun Fi Al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine) was translated into Latin at the end of the 12th century CE, and became a reference source for medical studies in the universities of Europe for 500 years!
Keep your distance – health lessons from the history of pandemics
From a simple cold to a serious illness, humans have always lived with the risk of catching diseases from one another. Pandemics affecting millions are fortunately rare, but the bubonic plague of the 14th century and the 1918 influenza outbreak have left a dark shadow on history.
Distillation in Muslim Civilisation
From rose water to hair dye, soap to paint, early chemists worked to create a panoply of useful substances. As early as the middle of the ninth century, experimenters in Muslim civilisation were aware of the processes of crystallisation, oxidation, evaporation, sublimation, and filtration. To make their experiments more accurate...
Suleymaniye Mosque – Powerful Domes
New Building Methods that Exalted the Heavens: Sinan the Architect designed and built impressive schools, mosques, and public buildings, approaching his work with an eye for harmony between architecture and the landscape. His work appeared in Damascus, Mecca, Bosnia, and elsewhere, but perhaps his most impressive building is his last, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey.
Extraordinary Women from the Golden Age of Muslim Civilisation
Extraordinary women from different faiths and backgrounds worked alongside men in Muslim Civilisation to advance their societies. Those talented women are shining examples and role models of women who excelled in fields of poetry, literature, medicine, philosophy and mathematics. We pay tribute to some of those women on International Women’s Day (IWD2016).
Constellations
Muslims also devised star maps and astronomical tables, and both of these would be used in Europe and the Far East for centuries. Maps of the heavens also appeared in art, such as on the dome of a bathhouse at Qusayr ’Amra, a Jordanian palace built in the eighth century, which has a unique hemispherical celestial map.
Lunar Formations and Astronomers from Muslim Civilisation
In 1651, Joannes Baptista Riccioli, a Jesuit professor of astronomy and philosophy in Bologna, Italy, compiled a comprehensive work on astronomy, called Almagestum Novum, with a complete map of the Moon. He named the lunar formations after distinguished astronomers of the Middle Ages. Ten were given the names of Muslim astronomers and mathematicians...
Code Breaking a Thousand Years Ago
To avoid vital secrets falling into the wrong hands, messages are scrambled (encrypted) so that only someone with the right code can unscramble them. A famous case of encryption was during World War II when the Germans used a typewriter-like machine, called Enigma, to encrypt military messages before playing them on the radio...
Master Navigators From Muslim Civilisation
A time when Muslim merchants could travel virtually unobstructed from Morocco to Southeast Asia, and navigators from Ming China could boast of enormous naval expeditions reaching as far west as Hormuz, Aden, and Mombasa, Western Europeans remained almost totally confined, both physically and intellectually, to a small slice of the world...
Travellers and Explorers from a Golden Age
Since the Quran said every able-bodied person should make a pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca at least once in their lifetime, thousands travelled from the farthest reaches of the Islamic empire to Mecca, beginning in the seventh century. As they travelled, they made descriptions of the lands that they passed through. Some of the most famous include...
Major Works on Herbal Medicine from a Thousand Years Ago
As the Muslim lands grew, merchants, scholars, and travellers came across exotic plants, trees, seeds, and spices previously unknown to them. They collected and brought back a huge number of samples of raw ingredients, along with knowledge and information about their use, combing the world and its harshest of environments, going as far afield as the steppes of Asia and the Pyrenees...