Islamic civilization الحضارة الاسلامية بالانجليزية

Islamic civilization الحضارة الاسلامية بالانجليزية

On the outer edge of the Latin world, in Spain, Sicily, and North Africa, and

surrounding Byzantium in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, was the world of Islam. For centuries, Islam was both a threat and the source of new ideas to the Greek East and Latin West. Between the 7th and 12th centuries, Islam became the center of a brilliant civilization and of a great scientific, philosophic, and artistic culture. Although its language was neither Greek nor Latin, Islam absorbed a great deal of Greek culture which it managed to preserve for the Latin West. In general, it can be said that Islam absorbed and added its culture to the heritage of Greece, Rome, Judaism, Christianity, and the Near East.

ISLAMIC LITERATURE

The cultural flowering of Islam began at the time when Europe, except for the Byzantine Empire, was in a state of disintegration--the Dark Ages. When Europe at last began to emerge from the doldrums, it was in great measure due to the efforts of Muslims, who had collected and translated into Arabic many of the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific works.

Although Europeans during the Middle Ages benefited from Islamic treatises on medicine, geography, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, they did not become acquainted with the original literary creations of the Muslim world. Even today, the rich heritage of Islamic literature is hardly known in the West, except for a few examples such as the Koran, the holy book of Islam; the `Thousand and One Nights' , or `Arabian Nights'; the `Rub�iy�t' of Omar Khayy�m; and the 20th-century works of Khalil Gibran. This unfamiliarity is due in part to the fact that almost all of this literature was written in languages that often were quite difficult to translate, in part because they used an alphabet in Semitic script. (See also ` Arabian Nights '; Gibran ; Koran ; Omar Khayy�m .)

Islamic Philosophy 
Islamic philosophy is unique in the sort of topics and issues with which it deals, the sort of problems it attempts to solve and the methods it uses in order to solve them 
Islamic philosophy concerned itself with such matters as the problem of unity and multiplicity, the relationship between God and the world, both of which had been subjects of heated controversies and discussions among the theologians for a long time.
MUSIC IN ISLAM

The scientific theory of music in those days in Persia was present in treatise on music of pre-Islamic times. Practical theory is evident; in the Dastanat of Barabad, seven modes and 360 melodies are mentioned; relating to the numerical metaphysics of Ancient Mesopotamia. From al-Hira, the capitol of the Lakhmids, Persian musical practices filtered into Arabian lands, and those people were great lovers of musical arts.

Islamic astronomy
Islamic astronomy comprises the astronomical developments made in the Islamic world, particularly during the Islamic Golden Age (8th–15th centuries), and mostly written in the Arabic language. These developments mostly took place in the Middle East, Central Asia, Al-Andalus, and North Africa, and later in the Far East and India. It closely parallels the genesis of other Islamic sciences in its assimilation of foreign material and the amalgamation of the disparate elements of that material to create a science with Islamic characteristics. These included Greek, Sassanid, and Indian works in particular, which were translated and built upon. In turn, Islamic astronomy later had a significant influence on Indian, Byzantine and European astronomy (see Latin translations of the 12th century) as well as Chinese astronomy and Malian astronomy.
A significant number of stars in the sky, such as Aldebaran and Altair, and astronomical terms such as alidade, azimuth, and almucantar, are still referred to by their Arabic names. A large corpus of literature from Islamic astronomy remains today, numbering approximately 10,000 manuscripts scattered throughout the world, many of which have not been read or catalogued. Even so, a reasonably accurate picture of Islamic activity in the field of astronomy can be reconstructed.

Islamic Medicine and Its Place in the History of Medicine

Whilst the Age of Islam was a time of intellectualism and scientific, social and philosophical advances, the greatest contribution to the world was Islamic medicine. The Islamic scholars gathered vast amounts of information, from around the known world, adding their own observations and developing techniques and procedures that would form the basis of modern medicine. In the history of medicine, Islamic medicine stands out as the period of greatest advance, certainly before the technology of the Twentieth Century. Ibn Sina, the Great Polymath

ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS

When a person reads for the first time about the Islamic civilization, he gets overwhelmed with the feeling of appreciation to this vast source of knowledge and wisdom. Every single detail reflects the ingenuity of Muslims who built this great civilization on the teachings of Qur’an. The best way to describe the Noble Qur’an is by quoting Abdullah Ibn Masuud, a companion of the prophet, when he said “the wonders of Qur’an are endless and everlasting”. We will be presenting some of the contributions of the Islamic civilization to engineering. It is astonishing to learn that Muslims reached these great achievements hundreds years ago.

 Islamic Law
Islamic civilization, since the time of Prophet Muhammad (s) until now, is firmly founded on the concept of ‘rule of law.’ For that reason, the law is published and known, and citizens and courts are expected to uphold it. In addition, Muslim citizens must adhere to Islamic law - Shariah. If a Muslim citizen commits a religious violation, he is judged according to Islamic law. A non-Muslim citizen is judged in religious issues by the laws of his own faith

Islam and science
Islam and science describes the relationship between Muslim communities and science in general. From an Islamic standpoint, science, the study of nature, is considered to be linked to the concept of Tawhid (the Oneness of God), as are all other branches of knowledge. In Islam, nature is not seen as a separate entity, but rather as an integral part of Islam’s holistic outlook on God, humanity, and the world. This link implies a sacred aspect to the pursuit of scientific knowledge by Muslims, as nature itself is viewed in the Qur'an as a compilation of signs pointing to the Divine. It was with this understanding that the pursuit of science was respected in Islamic civilizations, specifically during the eighth to sixteenth centuries, prior to the colonization of the Muslim world.
Theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili believes the modern scientific method was pioneered by Ibn Al-Haytham (known to the west as “Alhazen”) whose contributions he likened to those of Isaac Newton. Alhazen helped shift the emphasis on abstract theorizing onto systematic and repeatable experimentation, followed by careful criticism of premises and inferences. Robert Briffault, in The Making of Humanity, asserts that the very existence of science, as it is understood in the modern sense, is rooted in the scientific thought and knowledge that emerged in Islamic civilizations during this time.
Muslim scientists and scholars have subsequently developed a spectrum of viewpoints on the place of scientific learning within the context of Islam, none of which are universally accepted. However, most maintain the view that the acquisition of knowledge and scientific pursuit in general is not in disaccord with Islamic thought and religious belief.

Agriculture in Islam
Agriculture is the production of food, feed and fibre by the systematic harvesting of plants and animals. Agriculture was developed at least 10,000 years ago, and has undergone significant developments since the time of the earliest cultivation. Evidence points to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East as the site of the earliest planned sowing and harvesting of plants that had previously been gathered in the wild. The history of agriculture is a central element of human history, as agricultural progress has been a crucial factor in worldwide socio-economic change. Agriculture played a key role in the development of human civilization-it is widely believed that the domestication of plants and animals allowed humans to settle and give up their previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle during the Neolithic Revolution. Until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of the human population labored in agriculture. The development of agricultural techniques has steadily increased agricultural productivity, and the widespread diffusion of these techniques has led to new technologies.

Mathematics in Islamic Civilization

Islamic mathematical achievements were many as here outlined by Sabra . Islamic scholars devised and successfully applied new and elaborate techniques of computations; they constructed sophisticated mechanical computers; devised methods for calculating with decimal fractions; took significant steps toward extending the concept of number inherited from the Greeks, so as to include irrational magnitudes as well natural numbers and common fractions; added to the limited, ad hoc trigonometric methods they learned from the Greeks (Ptolemy's chord function) and from the Indians (the sine and tangent functions) and eventually developed them into an independent discipline no longer subservient to astronomy. They recast the algebraic modes of solving numerical problems found among the Greeks and the Indians, thereby creating a new form of algebraic discourse and setting the science of algebra on a new course (but without introducing a symbolic calculus), and they went a long way in exploiting the use of higher geometry (conic sections) in the solution of higher-than-quadratic equations .

Islamic Theology

Amongst the answers given to the questions posed by man in his quest for meaning in this world, the ones provided by Islamic sciences occupy a significant place. All of these sciences emerged directly in relation to the divine revelation, and their ultimate goal is to determine the true nature of the God-man-cosmos relationship. These sciences emerged in the Islamic civilization in light of the notion of "having faith and doing good, righteous work", which very succinctly formulates what was revealed by God through His Last Prophet.