When Europe (and probably the rest of the world) was in the dark ages, Muslims flourished in the areas of Science and Technology (and other areas which I would not be mentioning here). They were the prominent philosphers, scientists, astronomers, physicists, physicians and mathematicians of this period. I will mention a few of them here.
Ibn Sina aka Avicenna (980-1037) was known as “The Prince of Physicians”. His major contribution was his book “Al-Qanun” known as the “Canon” in the West. It is an encyclopaedia of medicine containing details of 760 drugs. Ibn Sina made significant advances towards recognition of diseases such as Tuberculosis.
Abu Nasr Al Farabi aka Al-Phrarabius (870-950) known as “The Second Teacher” wrote rich commentaries on Aristotle’s works in Physics, Logic etc which earned him the title as “The Second Teacher” (Aristotle is considered as the first). One of the major contributions of Al-Farabi were to simplify the learning of logic by classifying it into Idea and Proof.
Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi aka Algorizm (Died 840) is acknowledged as the founder of Algebra. In fact the name Algebra has been derived from his book Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah. As he developed several mathematical procedures his name ‘Algorithm’ “Algorizm’ has been given to them.
Jabir Ibn Haiyan aka Geber (Died 803) was an Alchemist during the Middle Ages. He is accredited with the invention of the Alembic, which simplified the process of distillation. His major contributions were perfection of scientific techniques such as crystalization, distillation etc and the discovery of mineral and others acids.
Ibn Rushd aka Averroes (1126-1198) was a great philosopher who was responsible for sowing the seeds of the Renaissance in Europe.
The other prominent scientists and philosophers of this time were Ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi aka Alkindus (800 - 873) who wrote 241 books in the fields of Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, Logic and Medicine, Thabit Ibn Qurrah aka Thebit (836 - 901) who made major contributions in the fields of Geometry and Astronomy where he analyzed and solved several problems related to the Sun Dials, Abu Marwan Ibn Zuhr aka Avenzoar (1091-1161) wrote a book called Kitab al-Taisir fi al-Mudawat wa al-Tadbir (Book of Simplification concerning Therapeutics and Diet) that contains his most details on pathological conditions and therapy, Ulugh Beg (1393-1449) was an astronomer who built an observatory in Samarkand and produced a book “Catalogue of the stars” which was the first comprehensive stellar catalogue since that of Ptolemy and gave positions of 992 stars.
It would require a lot of research to produce an exhaustive list of all the Muslim scholars of that time. This post is just to remember the outstanding philosophers and scientists of that period. I hope to follow up this post with another post on Muslim Scientists and Philosophers in the Modern Times.
The sites that I’ve primarily used for gathering material on the topic are MuslimPhilosophy.com, http://members.tripod.com/~wzzz/ and CIS | Major Voices in Islam and Science.
