MUSLIM INVENTIONS

SURGERY

• About 1,015 years ago, doctor Al Zahrawi published a book with the first ideas of surgical procedures
• He Discovered that cat guts could be used to sew a wound
• He later performed the first caesarean operation and created the first pair of forceps

COFFEE

• Around the 9th century, it was first brewed in Yemen
• Helped Sufis stay up late in nights of devotion
• Coffee was brought to Cairo, Egypt by a group of school students, and it soon became a hit
• By the 13th century, coffee had traveled to turkey, and in the 16th century, it had appeared in Europe

FLYING MACHINE

• Invented by abba ibn firmas
• In the 9th century, he designed a winged structure, resembling a bird costume
• The apparatus helped him fly for a few seconds before he fell to the ground and partially broke his back
• His designs would have been an inspiration for Leonardo da Vinci (hundreds of years later)

UNIVERSITY

• Princess Fatima al-firhi and her sister, Miriam, founded the first mosque-university in 859
• Almost 1,200 years later, the university is still opeating
• The university will remind people that learning is the center of Islamic tradition
• The story of the two sisters will hopefully inspire young Muslim women around the world

ALGEBRA

• The word comes from a Persian mathematician's treatise, called the kitab al-jabr wa al-mugabala (the book of reasoning and balancing)
• Unifying system for rational/irrational numbers and geometric magnitudes
• Al-khwarizmi also introduced the power to a number

OPTICS

• Al Haitham noted that humans see objects due to light reflecting off of the object and bouncing back to the eye
• He Proved that Euclid and ptolemy's theories (that light emits from the eye) was incorrect
• He also discovered the camera obscura phenomenon (how the eye sees images upright due to the connection of the optic nerves to the brain)

MUSIC

• Muslim musicians have had a great effect on Europe (since Charlemagne competed with music of Baghdad and cordoba)
• The lute and the Rahab (ancestor of the violin) were brought to Europe through the Middle East
• It is also said that modern music scales come from the Arabic alphabet

TOOTHBRUSH

• The prophet Mohammed was the first to popularize the toothbrush
• He used a branch from a meswak trees he brush his teeth and freshen his breath
• Meswak and other common substances are used in modern toothpaste

THE CRANK

• Many of the modern automatics were first introduced in the Muslim world
• The crank helps to lift heavy loads by converting rotary motion to linear motion
• Al-Jazari, the discoverer of this technology, found an invention that went viral around the world, and is still used in everyday objects today

HOSPITALS

• Ahmad ibn Tulun hospital was the first medical care center, founded in Cairo, 872
• Provided free medical care for anyone who needed it, a policy based on Muslim tradition (care for all who are sick)