1001 muslim inventions new york

Surgery Al-Zahrawi d. Read More. View Results. The Inventions Exhibition, showcasing Muslim contributions to science, technology and arts, has drawn a large number of visitors since its opening at the New York Hall of Science recently.

The exhibition, organized by the Inventions Foundation in cooperation with ALJ Community Initiatives, has already visited London and Istanbul as part of a global tour. The exhibition takes the visitors on a tour through its seven divisions to see replicas of the astonishing inventions of the Middle Ages. Displayed on a seven-meter high screen, the minute documentary accompanies a group of children in a journey in which they discover the period mistakenly referred as the Dark Ages.

The children discover a wealth of knowledge about the Muslim inventions in the period from the 7th to 17th centuries. In its newest version, the exhibition has enjoyed blockbuster runs in both London and Istanbul, attracting more than , visitors so far this year. During its first two weeks in New York , an audience of several thousand visited after dozens of US media outlets reported the arrival of the Inventions exhibition.

These reporters and numerous others over the years have recognised the aim and spirit of this unique exhibition. They saw it as a very successful attempt to popularise science amongst young people, especially those from non-Western origins, by making it fun and hands-on as against placing extant historical objects in secure see-through cabinets. They praised its attempt to bring out the important feature of continuity of scientific inventions as a global phenomenon which transcends race, culture, religion and politics, as against an erroneous and dangerous reductionist view which propounds that civilisation as we know it came from Greece and was reborn in modern Western Europe.

Visitors to the exhibition, intellectuals, journalists and indeed many other socio-cultural commentators welcomed a new space for dialogue in which the cultural roots of science are used as a tool for building inter-cultural respect and appreciation. We learn of advances in medical care, mathematics, astronomy and architecture. As it turns out, though, the account requires extensive qualification. Instead, it is as manipulative as it is illuminating. Hassani puts it in the book. The promotional goal is evident in every display.

The repeated suggestion is that Muslim scientists made discoveries later attributed to Westerners and that many Western institutions were shaped by Muslim contributions.

The exhibition, though, wildly overdoes it. First, it creates a straw man, reviving the notion, now defunct, of the Dark Ages. Then it overstates the neglect of Muslim science, which has, to the contrary, long been cited in Western scholarship. It also expands the Golden Age of Islam to a millennium, though the bright years were once associated with just portions of the Abbasid Caliphate, which itself lasted for about years, from the eighth century to So while neglect is clear, differences should be as well.

But the exhibition even seems to expand its claim. Sometimes Muslim precedence is suggested with even vaguer assertions. Is there any evidence of influence? Are the analyses comparable?