Science

Science and culture flourished under Muslim rule for centuries in a period known as the Islamic Golden Age. It grew in Damascus, Cairo, Cordoba and in Baghdad, where a great centre of learning and science called the ‘House of Wisdom’ was created.

It was here that thousands of ancient Greek and Indian works by Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, Galen, Charaka - the father of Indian medicine - and the Indian mathematician astronomer, Aryabhata, survived due to the Translation Movement. The findings were later transferred to Europe where they were translated from Arabic into Latin, and became pivotal to the Renaissance. Medical science made extraordinary progress during the Islamic civilisation and formed much of the basis of western healthcare today.

In the eleventh century, the Persian Muslim physician and intellectual, Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, became renowned for his ‘Canon of Medicine’, an encyclopaedia that covered all aspects of medical practice. His work was used as a standard medical textbook in European universities as late as the eighteenth century.

Today, many words from the Arabic language enter the sciences, like alchemy, alcohol, algorithm and algebra. In fact, the man known as the father of algebra was the ninth century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the word ‘algorithm’ is derived. Without algorithms, which perform calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning, computers would not exist today.