What Muslims Did

By Yahya Mubashar

Islamic civilization and its achievements are a significant link and era during middle ages that had been intentionally or un-intentionally erased from common man's history. Now many western historians are reopening that chapter and are acknowledging the great contributions Islam and Muslims made in every field of life. Building on achievements of previous civilizations, research done during Muslim era (700 - 1500 CE) lead to the improvement and understanding in various fields of science, art and culture and not only benefited mankind but also formed the basis of modern research and European Renaissance. This account of various developments is aimed to provide the missing link between the middle ages and modern times. It provides a dynamic picture to not only Muslim generations but to generations of every faith and nation. It also highlights the fact that when achievements and potentials of different nations and cultures are put together and worked on, the knowledge becomes fruitful and generations make progress with it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787191433

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Pharmacy

Tulips

Did you know that the name Tulip comes from the Turkish Dulban meaning Turban since the shape of the bloom suggests an inverted turban of the Ottoman Turks.

The tulip, much beloved flower of spring, brings to mind cheery, brightly coloured, cup-shaped flowers held on smooth green stems. Before tulips became practically ubiquitous in every springtime garden, they were grown and prized by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and later by the Dutch during the late 1500s and early 1600s. However, tulips also inspired an insidious side in people that coveted them. The Dutch tulip craze from 1636 to 1637 is a good example. Later in Holland, tulips were gradually bred and cultivated into the many forms we see today.

Tulipa agenensis from the Jerusalem Mountains

Tulips and the Turks

Tulips are native to Central and Western Asia, and parts of the Middle East, roughly in the region near Afghanistan. The origins of the tulip is said to be in the Tien-Shan and Pamir Alai Mountain Ranges near modern day Islamabad (Pakistan), from where they spread to China and Mongolia, and Azerbaijan and Armenia (Transcaucasia). These tulips were small, red and well suited to the harsh, dry, cold mountain conditions. It is thought that Nomadic Tribes moving west through the region first brought tulips out to the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Tulips cultivated in the Netherlands originated from areas now considered part of Russia, around the Black Sea, in the Crimea, and from the steppes located north of the Caucasus. In the 1500s when tulips were first introduced into Europe, these areas belonged to the great Ottoman Empire, also known as the Turkish Empire. The Turks prized tulips for their beauty and perfection, and held them up as examples of the perfection of God’s creations. Eventually tulips came to be thought of as the flowers of God, and were strongly symbolic. Turkish emperors and aristocrats enjoyed tulips immensely, and would plant them by the hundreds in elaborate gardens. The Turks also experienced a bulb craze from 1703-1730 in Istanbul, coinciding with the reign of Ahmed III.

Tulips came to Europe

Tulips first came into the hands of Europeans in the late 1500s. Conrad Gesner of Switzerland wrote of seeing a tulip in bloom in 1559 in a garden in Bavaria. In 1554, Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, an ambassador from Vienna, visited Istanbul and Suleiman the Magnificent, the current ruler of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The ambassador admired Suleiman the Magnificent’s tulip garden, and was presented with bulbs and seeds as a gift. These bulbs and seeds returned with the ambassador to Vienna, Austria, and most of them ended up in the gardens of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I. The rest of the seeds and bulbs were presented to a botanist named Carolus Clusius who was employed by the Imperial court. Clusius grew the tulips and sent samples of his plants to other botanists all over Europe, and for this reason became known as the Father of the Tulip. In 1593, Carolus Clusius became the Professor of Botany at Leiden University, in Holland. He took his tulip bulbs and seeds with him when he moved and introduced it to the people of Holland.

The name, tulip, probably comes from the word dulban meaning turban, translated into Latin as tulipa, since the shape of the blooms suggest an inverted turban.

References

Wikipedia contributors. Tulip. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia

Tulip - floriade canberra02 – John O’Neill – Wikipedia.org

Asabengurtza - Tulipes rouges – Wikimedia Commons

John Talbot - Tulip pond – Wikimedia Commons

Tulipa agenensis from the Jerusalem Mountains - Hebrew Wikipedia

Coffee

Goats will eat anything. Just ask Kaldi the legendary Ethiopian goatherd, who discovered coffee beans. Muslims developed this into a drink which is now spread across the world.

Goats will eat anything. Just ask Kaldi the legendary Ethiopian goatherd. Kaldi noticed his herd dancing from one coffee shrub to another, grazing on the cherry-red berries containing the beans. He chomped a few himself and was soon frolicking with his flock. Witnessing Kaldi’s goatly gambol, a monk plucked berries for his brothers. That night they were uncannily alert to divine inspiration. History tells us that other Africans of the same era (late 600–early 700) fuelled up on protein-rich coffee-and-animal-fat balls—primitive Power Bars—and unwound with wine made from coffee-berry pulp. Coffee later crossed the Red Sea to Arabia, where things really got cooking...

Coffee craze spread with Islam

Certainly the ingenious Arab who stirred up the first bean broth from the coffee berries agreeable seed had no way of knowing how this concoction would later stir the world. Roasted beans were first brewed around 1000. By the 13th century, Muslims were drinking coffee religiously. Launched from Yemen, its popularity soon perked across all Arabia, keeping worshipers awake and whirling through nightlong rituals and prayers. For teetotal Muslims, it became an integral part of religious and secular life.

Woman coffee farmer with basket of coffee beans in Ethiopia

Battles over the brew began about 1500 when physicians sought exclusive distributorship and mullahs complained that outside imbibing was emptying their mosques. Despite frequent efforts to restrict its use, coffee collected devout disciples as Islam’s influence pushed north and west, to North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and India.

Escape from Arabia (1000 to 1600)

Arabia made export beans infertile by parching or boiling, and it is said that no coffee seed sprouted outside Africa or Arabia until the 1600s—until Baba Budan. As tradition has it, this Indian pilgrim-cum-smuggler left Mecca with fertile seeds strapped to his belly. Baba’s beans bore fruit and initiated an agricultural expansion that would soon reach Europe’s colonies.

Coffee beans being sorted and pulped by workers and volunteers, on an organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee plantation in Guatemala

Europe catches the Buzz (1615 to 1700)

The Turks developed it as a drink of black colour. A merchant of Venice introduced Europe to coffee in 1615. But the end product didn’t amount to a hill of beans to many traders— they wanted the means of production. The race was on. The Dutch cleared the initial hurdle in 1616, spiriting a coffee plant into Europe for the first time. Then in 1696 they founded the first European-owned coffee estate, on colonial Java, now part of Indonesia. Business boomed and the Dutch sprinted ahead to adjacent islands. Confident beyond caution, Amsterdam began bestowing coffee trees on aristocrats around Europe.

Crossing the Atlantic

Louis XIV, the French emperor received his Dutch treat around 1714—a coffee tree for Paris. Several years later a young naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, was in Paris on leave from Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. He took a plant back with him. Under armed guard, the sprout grew strong in Martinique, yielding an extended family of approximately 18 million trees in fifty years or so. From these scant shoots sprouted the world’s greatest coffee empires in Latin America.

The Coffee Belt - The top ten coffee producers in 1981 are shown in yellow.

(Source - National Geographic Library Pictures)

References

www.bijlmakers.com/fruits/coffee.htm

Prinzessin - Dominica cocoa3 – Wikimedia commons

http://coffeeteawarehouse.com/coffee-history.html

Wikipedia contributors. History of coffee. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Coffee beans sorting - Source: http://flickr.com/photos/rohsstreetcafe/380885309/

Hospitals

In Medieval times, the Muslim’s practice of medicine was of the highest standards, developing isolation of patients and keeping patients with separate illnesses together, thus creating the concept of wards.

In ancient cultures, religion and medicine were linked. The earliest known institutions aiming to provide care were Egyptian temples. The Greek adopted the concept followed by the Romans. In these temples mostly religious rituals were practiced for the healing of the sick.

Some institutions were created specifically for the care of the sick in India three centuries before Christ, but the care was not full and only the rich were treated. Sinhalese (Srilankans) introduced the concept of dedicated hospitals in the 4th century. However, it was Persian Empire where the whole hospital system and formal training of physicians began.