1. Surgery
Around the year 1,000, the celebrated doctor Al
Zahrawi published a 1,500 page illustrated ency-
clopedia of surgery that was used in Europe as a
medical reference for the next 500 years. Among
his many inventions, Zahrawi discovered the use
of dissolving cat gut to stitch wounds -- before-
hand a second surgery had to be performed to re-
move sutures. He also reportedly performed the first
caesarean operation and created the first pair of forceps.
2. Coffee
Now the Western world's drink du jour, coffee was
first brewed in Yemen around the 9th century. In
its earliest days, coffee helped Sufis stay up dur-
ing late nights of devotion. Later brought to
Cairo by a group of students, the coffee buzz
soon caught on around the empire. By the 13th
century it reached Turkey, but not until the 16th
century did the beans start boiling in Europe,
brought to Italy by a Venetian trader.
3. Flying machine
"Abbas ibn Firnas was the first person to make a
real attempt to construct a flying machine and
fly," said Hassani. In the 9th century he designed
a winged apparatus, roughly resembling a bird
costume. In his most famous trial near Cordoba
in Spain, Firnas flew upward for a few moments,
before falling to the ground and partially breaking
his back. His designs would undoubtedly have been
an inspiration for famed Italian artist and inventor Leonardo
da Vinci's hundreds of years later, said Hassani.
4. University
In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi
founded the first degree-granting university in
Fez, Morocco. Her sister Miriam founded an ad-
jacent mosque and together the complex became
the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University. Still
operating almost 1,200 years later, Hassani says he
hopes the center will remind people that learning
is at the core of the Islamic tradition and that the
story of the al-Firhi sisters will inspire young Muslim
women around the world today.
5. Algebra
The word algebra comes from the title of a Per-
sian mathematician's famous 9th century trea-
tise "Kitab al-Jabr Wa l-Mugabala" which
translates roughly as "The Book of Reasoning
and Balancing." Built on the roots of Greek and
Hindu systems, the new algebraic order was a
unifying system for rational numbers, irrational
numbers and geometrical magnitudes. The same
mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, was also the first to intro-
duce the concept of raising a number to a power.
6. Optics
"Many of the most important advances in the
study of optics come from the Muslim world,"
says Hassani. Around the year 1000 Ibn al-
Haitham proved that humans see objects by
light reflecting off of them and entering the eye,
dismissing Euclid and Ptolemy's theories that
light was emitted from the eye itself. This great
Muslim physicist also discovered the camera obscura
phenomenon, which explains how the eye sees images
upright due to the connection between the optic nerve and the brain.
7. Music
Muslim musicians have had a profound impact on
Europe, dating back to Charlemagne tried to
compete with the music of Baghdad and Cor-
doba, according to Hassani. Among many in-
struments that arrived in Europe through the
Middle East are the lute and the rahab, an ances-
tor of the violin. Modern musical scales are also
said to derive from the Arabic alphabet.
8. Toothbrush
According to Hassani, the Prophet Mohammed
popularized the use of the first toothbrush in
around 600. Using a twig from the Meswak tree,
he cleaned his teeth and freshened his breath.
Substances similar to Meswak are used in mod-
ern toothpaste.
9. The crank
Many of the basics of modern automatics were
first put to use in the Muslim world, including
the revolutionary crank-connecting rod system.
By converting rotary motion to linear motion,
the crank enables the lifting of heavy objects
with relative ease. This technology, discovered by
Al-Jazari in the 12th century, exploded across the
globe, leading to everything from the bicycle to the
internal combustion engine.
10. Hospitals
"Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and
teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt,"
explained Hassani. The first such medical center
was the Ahmad ibn Tulun Hospital, founded in
872 in Cairo. Tulun hospital provided free care
for anyone who needed it -- a policy based on the
Muslim tradition of caring for all who are sick.
From Cairo, such hospitals spread around the Mus-
lim world.
Top 10 outstanding
Muslim inventions:
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Ramadan
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