The Arab world’s contributions to Western science are well known. Arabic scientific advances range from medicine to astronomy, where Arabic influence has left its mark in many popular star names such as Aldebaran. The modern scientific method has its roots in Arabic induction. In fact, the Golden Age of Arabic scientific discovery came at the same time as Europe hid from the Black Death and other terrors during the Dark Ages. However, the Arab world’s contribution to Western culture goes far beyond science.

Coffee

Although coffee was first used as a stimulant in ancient Ethiopia, it took the Arabs to think of roasting the beans and brewing them. The new beverage took the Middle East by storm. From there, it spread to Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, and became an early hit in Venice.

Yet coffee has not been without its controversy. Even at its point of origin, Khair Beg, the governor of Mecca, tried to ban coffee in 1511, after satirical verses about his governance started circulating in the coffeehouses. His attempt was overruled by his own sultan, who felt that coffee was a sacred substance.

In the Ottoman Empire, coffee went from being a banned substance, similar to alcohol, to a part of daily life so basic that being denied their daily coffee quota was grounds for women to divorce their husbands. The first known coffeehouse was opened in 1457 in Constantinople, which is now called Istanbul. It took another two centuries for coffeehouse culture to reach Italy.

However, its origins were against the acceptance of the “Muslim drink” in Christian Europe, to the point that priests petitioned Pope Clement VIII to ban “the devil’s drink” in 1600. However, Pope Clement tried a cup before deciding on his verdict. He finally proclaimed that coffee was “so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. … We shall cheat Satan by baptizing it.”

Beg’s early concerns would bear rich and sometimes violent fruit again and again in Europe, as social gatherings in coffeehouses repeatedly gave birth to artistic innovation, scientific discovery, political intrigue, and revolution. The Enlightenment and the ideas which brought about the American Revolution were born in the coffeehouses of Europe. In fact, the coffeehouses of England were so rich in intellectual discussion that they became known as “penny universities.”

As Beg before them, several European rulers tried to ban the coffeehouses, or sometimes the coffee itself. However, the ban could never be made to stick. When Charles II tried to ban coffee in 1675, his edict lasted just two weeks.

Today, coffeehouses aren’t the stimulating intellectual centers they used to be. However, coffee still plays a major role in Western culture. An estimated 83% of American adults drink coffee everyday. As many as 63% of American workers can’t face work without at least two cups of coffee. The growing commuter culture, combined with the need for a fast morning coffee, has helped to develop the modern drive-thru.

Restoration of the Classical body of knowledge to Europe

If it had not been for the Arab world, most of the ancient Greek and Latin texts would have been lost to Western civilization forever. The vast majority of these texts returned to the Western culture during the Crusades, Renaissance, and Enlightenment by way of Arabic translation, after having been lost in the places where they originated.

This loss had happened in part because of cataclysmic events, such as the sacking of Rome. However, a much more important factor in the loss of these works was Christian Europe’s distrust of pagan Classical ideas. As a result, ancient Greek works were often lost when monks scraped the text off old parchments in order to reuse them.

In the meantime, many Arabic philosophers and early scientists were analyzing the ideas in the Classical texts. In many cases, they had identified shortcomings and developed new foundations of their own.

Arabic philosophy and the scientific method

The Classical Greeks were the proponents of deductive reasoning and empiricism. While Aristotle made use of both deductive and inductive reasoning because it was “clear” to him “that we must get to know the primary premises by induction,” he did not believe that scientific knowledge could be acquired properly through induction. Instead, he thought that “intuition [is] the originative source of scientific knowledge.”

In the early 11th century, Ibn Sina, whose name has been Latinized as Avicenna, directly challenged Aristotle’s inductive claims by pointing out that Aristotle’s system “does not lead to the absolute, universal, and certain premises that it purports to provide.” Neither intuition nor Aristotlean induction was enough by itself. Knowledge could only be acquired through induction which was grounded in observation and experimentation.

At very close to the same time, Ibn al-Haytham developed this idea into the first genuine scientific method. His system had seven steps:

* Observe the natural world
* State a clear question
* Make a hypothesis
* Test the hypothesis through experimentation
* Assess and analyze the results
* Interpret the data and draw conclusions
* Publish the findings

The truce of 1192, following the Third Crusade, was the beginning of several years of peaceful trade and cultural interaction between East and West. Other crusades would follow later, but none of them drastically disrupted the new trading routes.

In 1214, Roger Bacon was born. He is generally credited as the father of the scientific method, which was based at that time on four steps: observation, hypothesis, experiment, and verification. Like many other scholars of the time, he compiled most of his writings from the texts available to him at the time. Those definitely included Arabic texts such as al-Haytham’s “Optics,” which was a major source for Bacon’s optics discussion in his “Opus Majus.”  However, like most scholars of the time, he presented the ideas without citing his sources.

Geography and the Age of Exploration

In 1151, Muhammad al-Idrisi completed the Tabula Rogeriana, so named because it had been commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily. It remained the most accurate map of the world for the next three centuries. It may look odd to modern eyes, because it is oriented so that south is at the top of the map.

However, it was not the only detailed and accurate map of its time, nor was al-Idrisi the only Arabic cartographer or explorer. Hassan al-Wazzan, better known as Leo Africanus, filled in many of the blanks in the Tabula Rogeriana with his account of his own travels in Africa. When Vasco da Gama explored the east coast of Africa, he hired an Arabic pilot, Ahmed ibn Majid, who brought with him maps which had never been seen in the West before. In this way, Arabic geographers and explorers opened up routes to African and Far Asian exploration by Europeans.

All this exploration and cartography was possible because of the Arabic invention of the quadrans vetus, an improvement on the Greek astrolabe which could be used for any latitude. Other navigational instruments invented or refined by the Arabs included the astronomical sextant and the saphaea, which was a universal astrolabe.

Commerce and mathematics

Up until the 13th century, Egyptian Arabic gold coins were the preferred coinage for international transactions throughout the Mediterranean world, including most of Europe. Even after the Third Crusade, early gold coinage for many European kingdoms was a near copy of the Abbasid coinage. In fact, in all the Slavic languages, the word for “money” comes directly from the Abbasid dinar coin.

All kinds of financial transactions depend on the modern Western numbering system. The so-called Arabic numerals are not really Arabic, but they did come to the west by way of the Arab world, as did the word “zero.” The word “algorithm” is based on Algoritmi, which is a Latinization of al-Khwarizmi, the Arabic mathematician who introduced the idea of zero to the Western world and who is considered to be the father of algebra.

Throughout the first millennium AD, number-literate people in every part of Europe counted by using Roman numerals. The earliest European use of Arabic numerals was in 976 AD, in a Spanish monastery on the edge of Islamic Spain. However, Gerbert of Aurillac is generally credited with first introducing Arabic numerals to Europe as part of his commercial endeavors. Thereafter, the use of Arabic numerals spread quickly throughout Europe, helped in large part by the Pisan mathematician Leonardo Fibonicci.