Still more on the President’s disastrous Cairo speech — as I pointed out here, he drastically overstated the achievements of Muslims in science and other areas.
“Obama Flunks History at Cairo U: Almost every advance he attributed to the Muslims in his big speech should be credited to someone else,” by Frank J. Tipler for Pajamas Media, June 7 (thanks to all who sent this in):
In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, President Barack Obama claimed: “As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam “” at places like Al-Azhar University “” that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing.”
Obama is not much of a “student of history” if he believes this. Almost every advance he attributes to the Muslims was due to someone else.
The non-Muslim Chinese invented the magnetic compass and printing (Gutenberg invented not printing, but movable type). The non-Muslim Hindu Indians invented algebra and the decimal numbering system. The non-Muslim European Christians invented the university.
I can’t address advances in medicine, but I have studied the history of astronomy and physics. The Muslims contributed nothing.
All modern physics descends from Galileo (1564 -1642); all modern astronomy from Copernicus (1473-1543). If you study Galileo’s works carefully, as I have, you see that he started with the achievements of the Greek mathematical physicist Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC). If you study Copernicus” works carefully, as I have, you will see that Copernicus” great book On the Revolutions is essentially a heliocentric re-working of the geocentric astronomy textbook by the Greek Ptolemy (c. 90 AD – 168 AD). Copernicus mostly used even Ptolemy”s data for the positions of the planets.
Note the dates for Archimedes/Galileo and Ptolemy/Copernicus. It is as if the Muslim world never existed. As far as their fundamental contributions to physics and astronomy, it did not….