Soren wrote on Mar 16th, 2012 at 9:28pm:Gippo literacy:
total population: 71.4%
male: 83%
female: 59.4%
Forty-four percent of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day. |
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That is what decades of secularism has done for them.
When Egypt was an Islamic state it had the biggest universities and libraries in the world.
While Christian Europeans lived in the Christian Dark Ages, Muslims living in Islamic states advanced.
Studies began at Al-Azhar University in Egypt in 975 AD. It had faculties in Islamic law and jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, Islamic philosophy, and logic. Today it is the oldest university in the world.
Iraq had one of the biggest libraries in the world while it was ruled by an islamic state. The House of Wisdom was a library and translation institute established in Abbassid-era Baghdad, Iraq. It was a key institution in the Translation Movement and considered to have been a major intellectual centre during the Islamic Golden Age. The House of Wisdom was a society founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid and culminating under his son al-Ma'mun, who reigned from 813–833 AD and is credited with its institution. Al-Ma'mun is also credited with bringing many well-known scholars to share information ideas and culture in the House of Wisdom Based in Baghdad from the 9th to 13th centuries, many of the most learned Muslim scholars were part of this excellent research and educational institute. It had the dual purpose of translating books from Middle Persian to Arabic and also of the preservation of translated books.
During the reign of al-Ma'mun, observatories were set up, and the House was an unrivalled center for the study of humanities and for science in medieval Islam, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, alchemy and chemistry, zoology and geography and cartography. Drawing on Persian, Indian and Greek texts—including those of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Plotinus, Galen, Sushruta, Charaka, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta—the scholars accumulated a great collection of world knowledge, and built on it through their own discoveries. Baghdad was known as the world's richest city and centre for intellectual development of the time, and had a population of over a million, the largest in its time.
Islamic Mali in its heyday had the biggest library in the world.
Timbuktu was a world centre of Islamic learning from the 13th to the 17th century, especially under the Mali Empire and Askia Mohammad I's rule.
Timbuktu’s rapid economic growth in the 13th and 14th centuries drew many scholars from nearby Walata, leading up to the city’s golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries that proved fertile ground for scholarship of religions, arts and science. An active trade in books between Timbuktu and other parts of the Islamic world and emperor Askia Mohammed’s strong support led to the writing of thousands of manuscripts.
Lecturing was presented through a range of informal institutions called madrasahs. Nowadays dubbed the ‘University of Timbuktu’, three madrasahs facilitated 25,000 students: Djinguereber, Sidi Yahya and Sankore.
Timbuktu served in this process as a distribution centre of scholars and scholarship. Its reliance on trade meant intensive movement of scholars between the city and its extensive network of trade partners. Many scholars left for Walata in 1591 with the Moroccan occupation.
Islamic education came under pressure after the French occupation, droughts in the 70s and 80s and by Mali’s civil war in the early 90s.
In Islamic Spain, the Umayyads wanted to be seen as intellectual rivals to the Abbasids, and for Córdoba to have libraries and educational institutions to rival Baghdad's. Although there was a clear rivalry between the two powers, freedom to travel between the two Caliphates was allowed, which helped spread new ideas and innovations over time.
The historian Said Al-Andalusi wrote that Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III had collected libraries of books and granted patronage to scholars of medicine and "ancient sciences". Later, al-Mustansir (Al-Hakam II) went yet further, building a university and libraries in Córdoba. Córdoba became one of the world's leading centres of medicine and philosophical debate.
Numerous scholars emerged, including Abu Uthman Ibn Fathun, whose masterwork was the philosophical treatise "Tree of Wisdom". An outstanding scholar in astronomy and astrology was Maslamah Ibn Ahmad al-Majriti (died 1008), an intrepid traveller who journeyed all over the Islamic world and beyond, and who kept in touch with the Brethren of Purity. Indeed, it is said to have been he who brought the "Epistles of the Brethren of Purity" to al-Andalus and who added the compendium to this work, although it is quite possible that it was added later by another scholar of the name al-Majriti.
A prominent follower of al-Majriti was the philosopher and geometer Abu al-Hakam al-Kirmani. A follower of his in turn was the great Abu Bakr Ibn al-Sayigh, usually known in the Arab world as Ibn Bajjah, "Avempace"
The Andalusian philosopher Averroes (1126–1198) was the founder of the Averroism school of philosophy, and his works and commentaries had an impact on the rise of secular thought in Western Europe. He also developed the concept of "existence precedes essence".
Another influential Andalusian philosopher who had a significant influence on modern philosophy was Ibn Tufail. His philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, translated into Latin as Philosophus Autodidactus in 1671, developed the themes of empiricism, tabula rasa, nature versus nurture, condition of possibility, materialism, and Molyneux's Problem. European scholars and writers influenced by this novel include John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, Melchisédech Thévenot, John Wallis, Christiaan Huygens,[48] George Keith, Robert Barclay, and Samuel Hartlib.
The English scientist Roger Bacon studied Latin translations of Spanish Arab scientific works.
In the 11th–12th centuries, astronomers in Al-Andalus took up the challenge earlier posed by Ibn al-Haytham, namely to develop an alternate non-Ptolemaic configuration that evaded the errors found in the Ptolemaic model. Like Ibn al-Haytham's critique, the anonymous Andalusian work, al-Istidrak ala Batlamyus (Recapitulation regarding Ptolemy), included a list of objections to Ptolemic astronomy. This marked the beginning of the Andalusian school's revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy, otherwise known as the "Andalusian Revolt".
In the late 11th century, al-Zarqali (Latinized as Arzachel) discovered that the orbits of the planets are elliptic orbits and not circular orbits.
In the 12th century, Averroes rejected the eccentric deferents introduced by Ptolemy. He rejected the Ptolemaic model and instead argued for a strictly concentric model of the universe. He wrote the following criticism on the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion:
"To assert the existence of an eccentric sphere or an epicyclic sphere is contrary to nature. [...] The astronomy of our time offers no truth, but only agrees with the calculations and not with what exists."
Ibn Bajjah also proposed the Milky Way galaxy to be made up of many stars but that it appears to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction in the Earth's atmosphere. Later in the 12th century, his successors Ibn Tufail and Nur Ed-Din Al Betrugi (Alpetragius) were the first to propose planetary models without any equant, epicycles or eccentrics.
In the late 11th century, Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Ma'udh, who lived in Al-Andalus, wrote a work on optics later translated into Latin as Liber de crepisculis, which was mistakenly attributed to Alhazen. This was a short work containing an estimation of the angle of depression of the sun at the beginning of the morning twilight and at the end of the evening twilight, and an attempt to calculate on the basis of this and other data the height of the atmospheric moisture responsible for the refraction of the sun's rays. Through his experiments, he obtained the accurate value of 18°, which comes close to the modern value.
In the early 13th century, the Andalusian-Arabian biologist Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati developed an early scientific method for botany, introducing empirical and experimental techniques in the testing, description and identification of numerous materia medica, and separating unverified reports from those supported by actual tests and observations. His student Ibn al-Baitar published the Kitab al-Jami fi al-Adwiya al-Mufrada, which is considered one of the greatest botanical compilations in history, and was a botanical authority for centuries. It contains details on at least 1,400 different plants, foods, and drugs, 300 of which were his own original discoveries. The Kitab al-Jami fi al-Adwiya al-Mufrada was also influential in Europe after it was translated into Latin in 1758.
The origins of the caravel ship, used for long distance travel by the Portuguese after the beginning of their overseas expansion in the 15th century, date back to the designs of the Cog, the Holk and the Dromon, but also possibly to the qarib used by explorers from Islamic Iberia in the 13th century.
Muslim physicians from Al-Andalus contributed significantly to the field of medicine, including the subjects of anatomy and physiology. Major figures of this period included Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis), author of the Kitab al-Tasrif ("Book of Concessions"), a 30-volume medical encyclopedia, and Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar), who made advances in surgery.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Boc0JjGRPF0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=george+saliba+islamic+science&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ULgwT4OMKcfgggfxmM2nBQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=400%2C000&f=false
