My roomates and I were sitting around chatting yesterday and we somehow got onto the concept of religion, education, western perspective, and numerous other things that reminded me of this class. Discussions like that make me optimistic, to a certain extent, because they remind me that people are aware that the education system they’ve been […]

I’m working on a paper for another class about how Cholera spread in India during the nineteenth century and how the British responded to it. What’s interesting is that religious pilgrimages were sites identified as places where the disease could easily be spread. Both in India and other parts of the world the British were […]

I was reading another article about Science and Islam during the Golden Ages and the author referred to Leonardo Da Vinci and his drawing of the Vitruvian Man and mentioned that Da Vinci said a man’s center was not at his navel but lower. As you may or may not know FIVE centuries earlier the […]

So today in Arabic class we were learning more words and their roots. Every word in Arabic is derived from a root and one of the words we learnt is توحيد (tawhid) which is derived from وحد (wahad). The word tawhid means to promote oneness and wahad means to unify. Then the teacher says a […]

I was researching for modern Muslim contributions to science that weren’t covered in anyone’s presentations (and sadly I didn’t find all that much) but I did find out about this Malaysian surgeon by the name of Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor who was the first to perform biomedical research in outer space. He performed experiments relating to […]

I noticed that something we didn’t really focus on in class was Islamic contributions to music, which is probably because our class focus was mainly Islamic contributions to science. Anyways, I was really surprised to find out that a lot of classical musical instruments are actually derived from Arabic instruments for example: – the qitara […]

Throughout this course we’ve explores some fascinating people and ideas from a long time period.  But a few times I have asked myself what my own reasons are for learning about these figures and why it would important for our society to acknowledge and explore this remarkable period of world history. To me there is […]

Hello, In my last post, I am going to talk about a Muslim scientist, philosopher, psychologist and musician named Abu Naser Al Farabi ( 872 – 951.) No one mentioned him in class so I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of his work. I am going to focus on his contribution […]

I’m sure most of you know about the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology. But why is this important, besides the fact that it may make huge advances in science and technology? Well first, according to them, the Institute is important because it is based on the notion to: Create an international community of […]

Last summer (I think around then) I went to see the IMAX film at Science World called Journey to Mecca. It is basically a short film depicting the life of Ibn Battuta during his travels to hajj. I happened to go on a special fundraiser night (I think we were raising money to help a […]