CAIRO,
March 10, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) - The Islamic civilization has made
an enormous but largely neglected contribution to the way people live
in the west, Britain's the Guardian newspaper reported on
Friday, March 10.
The
"1001 Inventions: Discover
the Muslim Heritage of Our World"
exhibition, which opened in London on Wednesday, March 8, and runs
through June, uncovers the Islamic civilization's overlooked
contribution to science, technology and art during the dark ages in
European history.
"It
[the Islamic civilization] is the thread that links cars, carpets and
cameras and is also responsible for three-course meals, bookshops and
modern medicine," the paper commented.
The
fair, supported by the Home Office and the Department for Trade and
Industry, lifts the veil on hundreds of innovations - from kiosks and
chess through to windmills and cryptography - that are often popularly
associated with the western world but originate from Muslim
scholarship and science.
Based
on more than 3,000 peer-reviewed academic studies, the exhibition
charts Islamic innovations during ten decades of "missing
history" spanning from the 6th to the 16th century and covering
an area stretching from China to southern Spain. (Click
to read the Guardian's article in full).
