Jerin and I celebrated Easter yesterday by hitching the Flushing bound bus to the New York Hall of Science, where a mobile exhibition, entitled “10001 Inventions – Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World,” was closing out its New York run. Aimed at challenging the prevailing myth that the fifth through fifteenth centuries were a “Dark Age,” and to offer a counterpoint to the abject barbarism of European society that gave rise to said belief, the exhibition showcased the enthralling spectrum of innovations that Muslim civilization brought into the world – technological, academic, medicinal, astrological, cartographical, and so forth.
The windmill, it turns out, originated in Afghanistan, and consisted initially of vertical sails standing perpendicular to the ground, as opposed to the horizontal sails that Europe would later make famous.
15th century Chinese-Muslim admiral Zheng He commanded a fleet of the largest wooden vessels ever built, at least five times larger than other ships of its day.
Ibn al-Hayam’s Book of Optics, written between 1011 and 1021, laid out fundamentally original ideas about light and vision, breaking from the idea that our eyes see by sending out invisible rays, and instead arguing in favor of the current understanding that light rays emitted from visible objects enter the space of the eyes.
Equally incredible, the famous traveler Evliya Celebi recorded that the first person to take a rocket-powered flight was his brother, Lagari Hasan Celebi, in 17th century Turkey, utilizing gunpowder to blast himself into the sky, where he spread out wings and glided down to safety.
Four hundred years earlier, Al-Jazari brought to fruition a huge constellation of gadgets and mechanisms, the most significant being a crank and connecting-rod system, one that transferred circular motion into linear motions, and remains to this day a crucial component of pumps and engines.
To its credit, the exhibit made certain not to limit its focus to the mere testosterone-driven innovations of history.
Merriam Al-Ijliya, an extraordinary woman of the 10th Century, excelled in instrument-making, and broke from the patterns of many of her female contemporaries by taking up a trade. She settled in northern Syria, where she specialized in astrolabes, meticulously constructed devices for land navigation and time telling.
The exhibit also showcased Fatima al-Fihri of Fez, Morocco. Al-Fihri received a sizable fortune from her businessman father, and, determined to improve the quality of life in her community, constructed in 841 a colossal mosque and college complex dubbed Al-Qarawiyin, known today as the world’s oldest university.
In addition to being a fascinating study in its own right, the exhibit served the added function of combating Islamophobia, attacking the construction of Islam as something alien and hostile to the West by effectively showing how the West as we know it would not have existed without the work of Muslims.
Finally, on a related note, 1001 Inventions made a decisive point to show that much of the Golden Ages (a far more apt title than its “Dark” counterpart) featured cooperation among faiths, with Christians, Jews, and Muslims all working together to further the evolution of science and human initiative.
At the end of our three-hour stint there, when at last we exited the building, I found myself hoping to pass Peter King or Newt Gingrich on their way into the exhibit. My whimsical side hopes that it might have altered their perspectives, but if past behavior is any predictor, they would most likely have left the museum defending the historical contributions of Europe’s barons and genocidal warlords.
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