“I have to say that I am absolutely delighted to support the 1001 Inventions Project. This is a scintillating and original initiative and incredibly timely. If you get a chance to get around the exhibition, it is fabulously organised.
When I was at school, I was always taught that after the fall of the Roman empire we had this extraordinary dark period of a thousand years called the dark ages, and that really troubled me, because how can there be such a time in human history, its very unlikely that people just stopped doing things. And of course, it’s a terrible misnomer…. There was no dark ages….
For the thousand years after 500AD there was an extraordinary amount of activity that radiated out from Baghdad and along a glittering crescent along North Africa and into Islamic Spain and the result of some of that activity is what you’ll be seeing in this 1001 Inventions exhibition. We’ve inherited all kinds of things from the Muslim world and Muslim Heritage is all around us today… for instance Arabic numerals that we use everyday and Arabic words like arsenal, almond, mattress, sugar…
One of the things I saw when making a recent documentary for Channel 4, where these beautiful Arabic manuscripts in Fez, Morocco, a number of these dealt with Aristotle, and it was fascinating seeing them, because as you turned these very old dusty pages you see that actually, the work of Aristotle has been advanced by Muslim scholars, and that’s something that is incredibly important to remember… that this was a time when Muslims and Non-Muslims worked together in collaboration. The tragedy of much of Muslim Heritage is that it was burnt in 1492 in Spain, over one million Muslim texts were set into the fires. But with a project like 1001 Inventions, I think we are going to see a phoenix rise from the ashes. “
The Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC) has produced a beautiful catalogue 1001 Inventions: How Muslim Civilisation Shaped The World. It reminds us just how the Middle East, North Africa and Al Andalus catalysed many of the trappings of modern life. An immensely useful corrective to our Greco-Roman-Renaissance sense of Western Civilisation.
The Times Summer Books: The Past by Dr. Bettany Hughes 03/07/2008
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(Left to Right) Dr Rim Turkmani, Dr Bettany Hughes, Prof. Jim Al-Khalili, Prof. Lorna Casselton, Prof. Mohamed El-Gomati, Sir Crispin Tickel and Prof. Salim T S Al-Hassani
https://muslimheritage.com/royal-society-discovery-of-arabic-culture/
