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History of Technology in Islam (1) - Al-Shia The Scientific and Cultural Website of Shia belief History of Technology in Islam (1) 2021-06-24 637 Views Islam and Technology , History of Technology , Mechanical engineering In this article titled “History of technology in Islam”, we shall be looking at “Mechanical engineering” as an engineering field to which Muslim scholars contributed immensely.

Mechanical Engineering The West is accustomed to seeing its own intellectual development as having been shaped, in the main, by internal factors. This view of history traces our heritage back from the Industrial Revolution to the Enlightenment and Renaissance and, thence, via the monkish scribes of the Middle Ages, to the fountainhead: Greece, Rome and the ancient empires of the Fertile Crescent.

But the picture is incomplete because it ignores the inter-meditation of the civilization of Greek Christendom (or Byzantium), Hindu India, Confucian China and Islam. Our subject here is the technology of medieval Islam – the knowledge it preserved, the new ideas it contributed to the medieval world and the inventions by which it anticipated later developments. When the died in AD 632, he left behind a new religion with its administrative centre at Medina and its spiritual heart at Mecca.

Within about a year of his death, the rest of Arabia had joined the Muslim fold; by 750 the Arab Empire stretched from the Pyrenees to central Asia. Although the advent of Islam brought immense political, religious and cultural changes, the technological traditions were largely unaffected. In mechanical engineering, the Muslims adapted the techniques of earlier civilizations to satisfy the needs of the new society. These needs centred on a city life more extensive than any seen since Roman times.

Baghdad’s population is estimated to have reached about 1.5 million in the 10th century, and cities such as Cordoba, Cairo and Samarkand, although smaller, were still of considerable magnitude. Paris, by contrast, would not number 100,000 souls for another 400 years. Feeding and clothing the inhabitants of the Islamic world’s vast urban centres placed great demands on agriculture and distribution.

These, in turn, depended on technology for supplying irrigation water to the fields and for processing the crops into foodstuffs. Water and water power, therefore, will constitute our first concern. Then we shall describe water mills.