RE:M'Hamed CHETTALI

Submitted by WeAreAllDanes! (United States), Feb 15, 2006 at 01:10

"Moreover, Muslims have made a valuable contribution to scientific progress. Karen Armstrong, the author of "Holy War", says, "This fact has never been acknowledged in the west that all the scientific and technological development that we have today, we owe it to the Arabs and Muslims".

Ms Armstrong may claim this, but it is not a correct statement.

The zero came from India, "Arabic numerals" - the decimal number system - came from Hindus in India, and the rest from the Greeks and Eqyptians (and Greeks in Egypt). Engineering, we mostly owe the Romans. The first known treatise on algebra dated back to AD 210 - long before Islam ever existed.

Incidentally, the high point of "Islamic science" was immediately after the conquest of Persia - as they conquered and destroyed (as "unIslamic") that civilization. It went quickly downhill from there.

The best you've got is Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi, a Persian, in 829AD. He wrote a treatise using Hindu numerals using Greco-Egyptian mathematics. He was the highpoint.

So, just how could all of our scientific progress be owed to *Muslim Arabs*? In fact, Ms Armstrong has no scientific or techincal background with which to make that claim.

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