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Category Archives: Moslem Scientists

Moslem Scientists

Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi – The Father of Modern Surgery

11-Sep-07

Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas Al-Zahrawi (936 – 1013), (Arabic: أبو القاسم بن خلف بن العباس الزهراوي) also known in the West as Abulcasis, was an Andalusian-Arab physician, surgeon, and scientist. He is considered the father of modern surgery, and as Islam’s greatest medieval surgeon, whose comprehensive medical texts, combining Islamic medicine and Greco-Roman teachings, shaped both Islamic and European surgical procedures up until the Renaissance. His greatest contribution to history is the Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices.

Biography

abu al-qasim al-zahrawiAbu al-Qasim was born in the city of El Zahra, six miles northwest of Cordoba, Spain. He was descended from the Ansar Arab tribe who settled earlier in Spain. Few details remain regarding his life, aside from his published work, due to the destruction of El-Zahra during later Spanish-Moorish conflicts. His name first appears in the writings of Abu Muhammad bin Hazm (993 – 1064), who listed him among the greatest physicians of Moorish Spain. But we have the first detailed biography of El-Zahrawi from al-Humaydi’s Jadhwat al-Muqtabis (On Andalusian Savants), completed six decades after El-Zahrawi’s death.

In El-Zahra, he lived most of his life. It is also where he studied, taught and practised medicine and surgery until shortly before his death in about 1013, two years after the sacking of El-Zahra.

Works

Abu al-Qasim was a court physician to the Andalusian caliph Al-Hakam II. He devoted his entire life and genius to the advancement of medicine as a whole and surgery in particular. His best work was the Kitab al-Tasrif. It is a medical encyclopaedia spanning 30 volumes which included sections on surgery, medicine, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, pharmacology, nutrition etc.

In the 14th century,

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Ibn Tufail (Abubacer)

11-Sep-07

Ibn Tufail (c. 1105, Gaudix, Spain – 1185) full name: Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusi أبو بكر محمد بن عبد الملك بن محمد بن طفيل القيسي الأندلسي (Latinised form: Abubacer). Andalusian Arab Muslim philosopher, physician, and court official.

Life

Born in Guadix near Granada, he was educated by Ibn Bajjah (Avempace). He served as a secretary for the ruler of Granada, and later as vizier and physician for Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad ruler of Al-Andalus, to whom he recommended Averroës as his own successor when he retired in 1182. He died in Morocco.

Ibn Tufail was the author of Ḥayy bin Yaqẓan, حي بن يقظان (“Alive son of Awake”): a philosophical romance and allegorical tale of a man who lives alone on an island and who, without contact with other human beings, discovers ultimate truth through a systematic process of reasoned inquiry. Hayy ultimately comes into contact with civilization and religion when he meets Absal. He determines that the trappings of religion, namely imagery and dependence on material goods, are necessary for the multitude in order that they might have decent lives. However, imagery and material goods are distractions from the truth and ought to be abandoned by those whose reason recognizes that they are distractions.

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Ibn Sina (Avicenna) – The Father of Modern Medicine

10-Sep-07

ibn sina the father of modern medicineAbu ʿAli al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Sina (c. 980 in Afshana near Bukhara, Khorasan – 1037 in Hamedan), also known by his Latinized name Avicenna (Gr. Αβιτξιανός), was a Persian Muslim polymath: an astronomer, chemist, logician, mathematician, physicist, poet, scientist, theologian, statesman, soldier, and foremost physician and philosopher of his time.

He wrote some 450 books on a wide range of subjects, many of which concentrated on philosophy and medicine. His most famous works are The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many Islamic and European universities up until the 18th century. Ibn Sina developed a medical system that combined his own personal experience with that of Islamic medicine, the medical system of Galen, Aristotelian metaphysics, and ancient Persian, Arabian and Indian medicine. Ibn Sina is regarded as the father of modern medicine, particularly for his introduction of systematic experimentation and quantification into the study of physiology, and for his discovery of the contagious nature of diseases. He is also considered the father of the fundamental concept of momentum in physics.

George Sarton, the father of the history of science, wrote in the Introduction to the History of Science:

“One of the most famous exponents of Muslim universalism and an eminent figure in Islamic learning was Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (981-1037). For a thousand years he has retained his original renown as one of the greatest thinkers and medical scholars in history. His most important medical works are the Qanun (Canon) and a treatise on Cardiac drugs. The ‘Qanun fi-l-Tibb’ is an immense encyclopedia of medicine. It contains some of the most illuminating thoughts pertaining to distinction of mediastinitis from pleurisy; contagious nature of phthisis; distribution of diseases by water and soil; careful description of skin troubles; of sexual diseases and perversions; of nervous ailments.

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Ibn al-Shatir – Astronomy Scientist

10-Sep-07

Ibn al-Shatir (1304 – 1375) (Arabic: ابن الشاطر) was an Arab Muslim astronomer. He worked as muwaqqit (موقت, religious timekeeper) in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and constructed a magnificent sundial for its minaret.

His most important astronomical treatise was the Kitab nihayat al-sul fi tashih al-usul (The Final Quest Concerning the Rectification of Principles), in which he drastically reformed the Ptolemaic models of the Sun, Moon, and planets, while eliminating the eccentrics and equant by introducing extra epicycles.

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Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni – The Father of Indology

10-Sep-07

al-biruni moslem scientistAbu Rayḥan Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Biruni (September 15, 973 in Kath, Khwarezm – December 13, 1048 in Ghazni) was a Persian Muslim polymath of the 11th century, whose experiments and discoveries were as significant and diverse as those of Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo, five hundred years before the Renaissance; al-Biruni was well-known in the Muslim world, but unlike some of his other Muslim contemporaries (such as Abulcasis, Alhacen, and Avicenna), al-Biruni’s name was little known in the Western world.

He was a scientist and physicist, an anthropologist, an astronomer and astrologer, an encyclopedist and historian, a geographer, a geodesist and geologist, a mathematician, a pharmacist and physician, a philosopher and Ash’ari theologian, a scholar and teacher, and a traveller, who contributed greatly to all of these fields. He was also the first Muslim scholar to study India and the Brahminical tradition, and has been described as the father of Indology, the father of geodesy, and “the first anthropologist”. Along with Geber and Ibn al-Haytham, al-Biruni was also one of the earliest leading exponents of the experimental method, and the first to conduct elaborate experiments related to astronomical phenomena.

George Sarton, the father of the history of science, described al-Biruni as:

“One of the very greatest scientists of Islam, and, all considered, one of the greatest of all times.”

A. I. Sabra desribed al-Biruni as:

“One of the great scientific minds in all history.”

The Al-Biruni crater, on the Moon, is named after al-Biruni.

Biography

He was born in Khwarazm (formerly north-eastern part of the Persian Samanid dynasty) presently in Khiva, Uzbekistan. He studied mathematics and astronomy under Abu Nasr Mansur.

He was a colleague of the fellow Persian Muslim philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (Avicenna),

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