beetz In the medieval Islamic world there was a tremendous desire to learn about the world.. From the 10th century to the 12th century Islamic inventing flourished: Numerous mathematicia
Trang 1The first carriages started to be used from the 1370s,
possibly earlier Rocking carriages originated in what is
to-day Hungary; the body of the carriage was suspended by
leather straps from the frame, a design that helped smooth
out bumpy rides By the 15th century they were common in
western Europe
The numerous technological developments that occurred
over the course of the Middle Ages were primarily the work
of unknown inventors People were only just starting to
fo-cus on contemporary inventions as something of interest in
their own right This lack of interest in the subject of
inven-tion means that the identities of very few medieval inventors
are known
The islAmic World
by KirK h beetz
In the medieval Islamic world there was a tremendous desire
to learn about the world Learning about nature and how it
worked seemed to many people to be a godly pursuit, because
it involved understanding God’s creation In the process of
making discoveries about nature, Muslims learned how
as-pects of the physical world worked, and out of this
knowl-edge came new ways for keeping time, new methods to move
water efficiently, and perhaps new sciences, such as
pharma-cology and agriculture Medieval Muslims would not have
used the term science, which they reserved only for the study
of religion and religion’s application to living; nevertheless,
Muslims developed what modern people would call natural
science From the 10th century to the 12th century Islamic
inventing flourished: Numerous mathematicians,
astrono-mers, and chemists hit upon fresh ways of thinking about and
seeing the world
In the Islamic world there was always conflict between
those who wished to invent and those who resisted change to
their way of life This conflict manifested itself in two major
ways One manifestation was in a division between
theolo-gians and philosophers In general, the philosophers viewed
the secular world as existing apart from the religious world
They believed that the Koran applied only to spirituality and
that the Hadith (comprising accounts of Muhammad’s life
and sayings) was too fragmentary to supply guidance to
re-search into the natural world They were opposed by
theo-logians, who insisted that all of life was religious and that
the study of the natural world and the study of God were the
same thing, indivisible
The other division had become a powerful social force
by the 12th century and came to dominate much of Islamic
teaching This division involved the belief that just as the
Ko-ran was the final revealed word of God, given to God’s last
prophet, Muhammad, and just as Arabic was the one lan-guage in which to read and understand God’s word, so too the world in which the word was revealed was the only proper world in which to live In sum, this point of view held that nothing not existing in the age of Muhammad—that is, the seventh century—should exist in the world thereafter These views—that there was no secular world, only a reli-gious one, and that the seventh century represented the ideal level of human advancement—had real-world consequences Great observatories were torn down because clerics declared them to be too secular Financial support by governments and private donors was often withheld from inventors, and some scientists and inventors had to travel from place to place
to find sites where they could do their research and even teach
in schools It is because of the general, but not complete, curb-ing of invention in the Islamic world after the 12th century that some historians refer to the period from 900 to 1200 as a golden age for Islamic science and invention, and historians also use it to account for why the civilization of the Islamic world outshone many other cultures in scholarship and in-vention in the 12th century but eventually fell behind Chris-tian Europe in technology and scientific research
There were also divergent views on medicine, creating a long-term tension within Islamic medical circles One view
was tibb nabawi, meaning “prophetic medicine.” This
philos-ophy developed as a reaction against ancient Greek learning, which in translation had spurred much growth in medical
practices in the Islamic world Tibb nabawi looked to what
the Hadith said about how Muhammad and those close to him dealt with health and medical issues In general, it dis-regarded what the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese had
to say about medicine The majority of Islamic physicians fol-lowed another point of view—that they as medical profession-als were searching for truth and that it did not matter where the truth came from These physicians were notable for their keen observation of symptoms One such physician, Ibn al-Khatib (ca 1313–74), through empirical observation, learned how contagious diseases spread, especially plague His work may have led to the invention of inoculating people against diseases, which peoples of the Near East seem to have been doing before Europeans took up the practice
Although the Islamic world may have lagged behind the Far East in surgical practices, its inventors created numerous surgical instruments, including types of saws and scalpels that are similar to instruments of modern surgeons In other ways, physicians of the Islamic world may have been unsur-passed in the medieval era because they invented a way of thinking about treatment of patients, based on observation Rather than relying on tradition, even the tradition of the an-cient Greeks, they observed and noted how medicines affected
inventions: The Islamic World 581