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What is the significance of Friday prayers in Islam?

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Last Friday, Muslims were killed while praying at two mosques in New Zealand. For Muslims, Friday is the day of gathering, the most important prayer day of the week.

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Successful Day at a Mosque | Have a Little Faith with Zach Anner

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Saif Adam - Trust In Allah - Official Lyric Video

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Islam - Religious Studies (Professor Stephen Prothero)

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From Xi'an to Mecca : The Road to Hajj - China | Featured Documentary

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Islamic Centre of Southwest Ontario London

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This article looks at Zakat, which is the compulsory giving of a set proportion of one's wealth to charity.

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Strong faith is a core part of Alaa Murabit's identity -- but when she moved from Canada to Libya as a young woman, she was surprised how the tenets of Islam were used to severely limit women's rights, independence and ability to lead. She wondered: Was this really religious doctrine?

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What my religion really says about women

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Strong faith is a core part of Alaa Murabit’s identity -- but when she moved from Canada to Libya as a young woman, she was surprised how the tenets of Islam were used to severely limit women’s rights, independence and ability to lead. She wondered: Was this really religious doctrine? With humor, passion and a refreshingly rebellious spirt, she shares how she found examples of female leaders across the history of her faith — and how she speaks up for women using verses from the Koran.

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10 Misconceptions About Islam That Muslim Americans Are Tired of Hearing

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10 Misconceptions About Islam That Muslim Americans Are Tired of Hearing

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10 Misconceptions About Islam That Muslim Americans Are Tired of Hearing

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BBC - Religion & Ethics - In pictures: Muslim prayer movements

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Muslims pray at least five times throughout the day with set movements and phrases

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Islam - Religious Studies (Professor Stephen Prothero)

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What is Ramadan? What does it mean to you?

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I've written several blog posts about the importance of talking to our children about Jesus and what he means to Christians as well as how Unitarian Universalists view him. I believe it is equally important to share stories about the prophet Muhammad; however, until recently there has been a shortage of good resources for Unitarian Universalist parents on Islam and Muhammad in particular.

Now, from Skinner House, Muhammad: The Story of a Prophet and Reformer is available with a series of short stories exploring his life-including his childhood. This book written by Sarah Conover can be read independently by most children over age 12, but it would be a much richer experience if shared between a parent and a child (even those younger than 9) so that questions can be asked and ideas raised by the book can be discussed.

Intricate details bring these stories to life for children of all ages, such as: how and why his mother sought a wet nurse to raise him in the desert instead of raising him herself as a single mother in the polluted city of Mecca; and how as a child being raised in the desert, he often sought the solitude of his own company which allowed him to appreciate the wonder of nature epitomized by the determined shoot of a green plant rising from a crack in a rock.

In reading this book, I discovered an amazing number of similarities in the life of Muhammad and the stories told about Jesus. They both asked a lot of questions as a child (something our Unitarian Universalist children can surely relate to), the desert featured in both of their lives, and they both suffered hardships because of the radical beliefs they were preaching yet refused to waver from the path they traveled.

I also learned that when Islam became "the path of spiritual, social, and political reform across Arabia and eventually, well beyond those borders," it often served to replace tribal laws that were brutal and unforgiving. Likewise, I discovered that Muhammad devoted his life not just to spreading the religion of Islam but-through his message-changing the social inequities of the time. He deeply believed that education was a key to empowering the poor-for both men and women. This was most definitely a radical idea of the time!

While this story book follows Muhammad's life into adulthood and his revelations through the rise of the new religion of Islam, it also shares how he regularly interacted with family members and friends who had much different religious beliefs than his-including Pagans, Jews, and Christians. As Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, explains in the introduction of the book, "so frequently we hear the perversion that Islam is a tradition that seeks either separation from others or domination over them. These stories highlight the relational dimensions of Islam, an important lesson for both Muslims and non-Muslims."

This is a very important lesson indeed, particularly in our current cultural climate where Muslims are frequently portrayed as evil villains who are bent on destroying the American way of life. If we are to raise our children as religiously literate human beings who can be leaders in the interfaith movement of the even more religiously diverse world of the future, then we need to allow them to explore stories from the Islamic tradition as well as the other two that make up the Abrahamic faiths: the Christian and Jewish traditions.

It is also important to teach our children that the more radical elements of any religion do not speak for the majority of people who follow that faith, despite the fact that those more radical elements are the ones who make the TV news. So if we are indeed a people who raise our children to believe that all persons have inherent worth and dignity-and that we seek wisdom not only from science-but also from the world's religions to inspire us, then we should share stories from many different faith traditions-including Islam.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Until recently, there has been a shortage of good resources for Unitarian Universalist parents on Islam and Muhammad in particular.

# data[].attributes.headline
What it's like to be a Muslim in America | Dalia Mogahed

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What it's like to be a Muslim in America | Dalia Mogahed

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What it's like to be a Muslim in America | Dalia Mogahed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is Ramadhan and Why Do Muslims Fast?

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In his recent article, Sam Harris, a popular critic of Islam, referred to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist, as "the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in 1,000 years." Hidden in this comment is the idea that Malala's fellow Muslims are backward and that her religion, Islam, is not conducive to change or progress.

Conversely to the beliefs of Harris and others like him, Muslims have actually made enormous contributions to civilization, perhaps due to the heavy emphasis that Islam places on knowledge. People who forget or blatantly ignore major trends or events in world history can be said to suffer from "historical amnesia." Though this mindset cannot be cured in one short blog post, I hope to dispel some of the stereotypes and misperceptions exacerbated by Harris and other anti-Islam activists by highlighting the contributions that Muslims have made to civilization over the years.

Contributions to education

Malala's quest for universal education follows in Muslims' long and proud history in the field of education. Two Muslim women, Fatima and Miriam al-Firhi, created the world's first university, Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, in 859 AD. For several years, students were schooled here in a plethora of secular and religious subjects. At the end of their education, teachers evaluated students and awarded degrees based on satisfactory performances. The concept of awarding degrees would spread from Fez to Andalucía, Spain, and later to the Universities of Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England, among other places of learning.

Spanish Muslims of Andalucía were especially strong advocates of education and helped to dispel the gloom that had enveloped Europe during the Dark Ages. Between the 8th and 15th centuries, Andalucía was perhaps the world's epicenter for education and knowledge. Spanish universities such as those in Cordoba, Granada, and Seville, had Christian and Jewish students who learned science from Muslims. Women were also encouraged to study in Muslim Spain. This educational environment that stressed tolerance would not reach the "Western world" until the 19th and 20th centuries.

Contributions to philosophy

One of the greatest Muslim contributions to civilization began in the 8th century when Muslim scholars inherited volumes of Greek philosophy. The wisdom in ancient Greece texts, which had been lost to Europeans, was translated from Latin to Arabic by Muslim scholars, thus creating one of the greatest transmissions of knowledge in world history. Muslims scholars would eventually bring the ideas of great ancient Greek minds such as Socrates, Aristotle and Plato into Europe, where their philosophy was translated into other European languages. This is why Muslims are the main threshold behind the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment, two movements that resurrected Greek philosophy and gave new life into a European continent that was bogged down with religious dogma and bloody internal conflicts.

Many Muslim scholars made acquiring knowledge their life goal. Perhaps the most notable of these scholars is Al-Ghazali, a Sufi Muslim who in the 11th and 12th centuries revolutionized early Islamic philosophy by helping develop Neoplatonism, which is often described as the "mystical" or "religious" interpretation of Greek philosophy. At the time of Al-Ghazali's writing, Muslim philosophers had read about the ideas of ancient Greece, but these ideas were generally perceived to be in conflict with Islamic teachings. Al-Ghazali helped synthesize these elements by adopting the techniques of Aristotelian logic and the Neoplatonic ways to diminish the negative influences of excessive Islamic rationalism.

Ibn Khaldun is another one of the most important Muslim thinkers in history. Recognized as one of the greatest historians ever and the founder of sociological sciences in the 14th and 15th centuries, Khaldun created one of the earliest nonreligious philosophies in history in his work, the Muqaddimah. He also paved the way for our expectations of modern-day Presidents and Prime Ministers by creating a framework for evaluating "good rulers," stating "the sovereign exists for the good of the people... The necessity of a Ruler arises from the fact that human beings have to live together and unless there is some one to maintain order, society would break to pieces."

Contributions to health care

Medicine is another crucial contribution to civilization made by Muslims in addition to education and the university system. In 872 in Cairo, Egypt, the Ahmad ibn Tulun hospital was created and equipped with an elaborate institution and a range of functions. Like other Islamic hospitals that soon followed, Tulun was a secular institution open to men and women, adults and children, the rich and poor, as well as Muslims and non-Muslims. Tulun is also the earliest hospital to give care to the mentally ill.

One hundred years after the founding of Tulun, a surgeon named Al-Zahrawi, often called the "father of surgery," wrote an illustrated encyclopedia that would ultimately be used as a guide to European surgeons for the next five hundred years. Al-Zarawhi's surgical instruments, such as scalpels, bone saws, and forceps are still used by modern surgeons. Al-Zahrawi is also reportedly the first surgeon to perform a caesarean operation.

Another significant Muslim discovery came in the 13th century, when the Muslim medic Ibn Nafis described the pulmonary circulation almost three hundred years before William Harvey, the English physician who is believed by many Westerners to have "discovered" it. The technique of inoculation, or the introduction of an antigenic substance or vaccine into the body to induce immunity to a disease, is also said to have been designed by Muslims in Turkey and brought to Europe by the wife of England's Turkish ambassador in 1724.

Protecting and cleansing the body has always been a priority for Muslims. Perhaps then it is no surprised that Muslim scientists combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil to create a recipe for soap, which is still used today. Shampoo was also introduced to England on the Brighton seafront in 1759 at Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths.

There is also little doubt that the development of astronomy owes a great deal to the work of Muslim astronomers. As far back as the early 9th century, the Caliph Al-Ma'mum founded an astronomical observatory in Shammasiya in Baghdad and Qasiyun in Damascus. Five hundred years later, in 1420, Prince Ulugh Bey built a massive observatory in Samarqand, which was then followed in 1577 by another observatory built by Sultan Murad III in Istanbul.

The Ottomans had particularly well-organized astronomical institutions such as the post of chief-astronomer and time-keeping houses. Taqi al-Din, a 16th century Ottoman astronomer, created astronomical tables and observational instruments that helped measure the coordinates of stars and the distances between them.

Muslims have also made contributions in the field of chemistry by inventing many of the basic processes and apparatuses used by modern-day chemists. Working in the 8th and 9th centuries in Andalucía, Jabir Ibn Hayyan, the founder of modern chemistry, transformed alchemy into chemistry through distillation, or separating liquids through differences in their boiling points. In addition to developing the processes of crystallization, evaporation, and filtration, he also discovered sulphuric and nitric acid. The historian Erick John Holmyard stated that Hayyan's work is as important, if not more, than that of Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier, two European chemists who are frequently attributed to creating modern chemistry.

Indeed our very modern and globalized world today would not be able to move so quickly if it were not for the genius of Ibn Firnas, a Muslim engineer of Andalucía who in the 9th century constructed a flying machine, thus becoming the world's first aviator. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba, Spain, using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. Although he hoped to glide like an eagle, Ibn Firnas did not, though he is credited for creating the first parachute.

Muslims have also influenced the study of physics, a closely linked field to flying and aviation. Mohammad Abdus Salam, a Pakistani theoretical physicist, shared a 1979 Nobel Prize for his contribution to the field of theoretical physics, specifically in unifying electromagnetic and weak forces.

I have only scratched the surface of the contributions made by Muslims to the development of civilization. Children around the world should be taught about these contributions to dispel the misperception that Muslims are backward and stagnant. Muslims worldwide must also invest more in education, medicine, and other sciences in order to continue their tradition of being pioneers for knowledge.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Overcoming Historical Amnesia: Muslim Contributions to Civilization

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
People who forget or ignore major events in world history can be said to suffer from "historical amnesia." Though this mindset cannot be cured in one short blog post, I hope to dispel some of the stereotypes and misperceptions by highlighting the contributions that Muslims have made to civilization.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Muhammad Timeline Muhammad Biography Muhammad Story Birth of Muhammad Seerah Muhammad Khan Academy Muhammad Muhammad Ali Life Prophet Muhammad Muhammad History When Was Muhammad Born PBS Muhammad Pbuh Muhammad SAW Islam Muhammad Biography Hazrat Muhammad Conquest of Mecca Prophet Muhammad Summary Mohammed PBS Muhammad Animation Muhammad Historicity Muhammad Full Movie

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The role of ritual prayer in Islam made plenty of headlines in Minnesota last year.

In the fall, a comment disparaging Muslims appeared on the Facebook account of then-Columbia Heights school board member Grant Nichols. It alluded to the act of ablution, or washing parts of the body before prayer, and referred to the bathroom habits of Muslims as "unsanitary." Nichols, who maintains he was not the person who made the post, later resigned.

At the end of 2015, Wayzata, Minn.-based Cargill fired about 150 Muslim workers from a Colorado meat packing plant after they walked off the job during a dispute over workplace prayer.

Some employees said the company changed the policy that had allowed for short breaks throughout the work day. Cargill disputes that claim, saying the firings "appear to be based on a misunderstanding, or misinformation, about a perceived change in our religious accommodation policy that did not occur. Allegations that we were not going to allow prayer any longer are false."

Prayer throughout the day, during which Muslims take time to remember God, is a hallmark of Islam.

"It cleanses you, keeps you mindful, keeps you grateful and keeps you humble," said Aida Al-Kadi. "It makes you a better person. It has a lot of emotional and psychological benefits."

How many times must Muslims pray each day?

Five times every day, all Muslims pray at the same time, facing the same direction.

"It's a sense of unity," said Wafiq Fannoun, executive director of the online Islamic school Mishkah University.

Salat is the second of the Five Pillars of Islam. It requires all Muslims who have reached puberty to worship five times daily, facing the holy city of Mecca. (Women who are menstruating or women who have recently given birth are excluded from the requirement.)

It's preferred that Muslims offer their prayers in a mosque, but if they are unable to, they can pray anywhere as long as it's clean.

When do Muslims pray?

The specific times can change daily, depending on the position of the sun. Many Muslims use smartphone apps that list prayer times each day. Many of those apps even include compasses that point toward Mecca.

* Fajr: Dawn, before sunrise

* Dhuhr: Midday, after the sun has reached its zenith

* Asr: Afternoon

* Maghrib: Sunset

* Isha: Night

In addition, Muslims hold a congregational prayer, called Jum'ah, at the mosque on Fridays. When Muslims pray Jum'ah, they are not required to pray Dhuhr afterwards.

Omid Safi, director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center, elaborated on the timing of the prayers:

"We tend to get distracted, lost in the busyness of life and work. Prayers are an opportunity to come back to God, come back to who and what we are truly made to be. That's why the prayers are spaced out.

They are also a chance to be re-attuned to the natural cosmos, which is the prayer times are based on the apparent movement of the sun. So think of the prayers as a chance to connect with our own heart and souls, with community, with nature, and with God."

While there is a small amount of wiggle room in the timing of each prayer - start time for each prayer doesn't have to be exact - "it isn't something that you can really delay if you're really being observant," said professor William O. Beeman, chair of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the Islamic world.

Al-Kadi said praying on time "shows respect for our creator."

"Imagine you were going to see your boss at noon, would you miss that time? Or say you had to go to a doctor's appointment, would you arrive late?" she said. "No, you would be on time."

Where do Muslims go to pray if they're at work or school?

Muslims need a clean space to pray - bathrooms are considered unsanitary for prayer - that will allow them room to kneel and prostrate. Some worship in their cubicles or offices at work, or in empty classrooms.

Some places that serve or employ large Muslim populations around the state offer quiet spaces that can be used for prayer, including Dakota County Technical College, Inver Hills Community College and the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. At the University of Minnesota, the Al-Madinah Cultural Center has space for prayer at Coffman Memorial Union.

How do Muslims pray?

A call to prayer, the adhan, precedes worship. In Muslim countries, the call, sung by a muezzin, is broadcast on outdoor loudspeakers. In Minnesota, the adhan is played inside mosques.

Before prayer, Muslims also wash their hands, mouth, nose, face, arms and feet to purify themselves.

The prayer itself can be done in as little as five minutes, and can be performed solo or with a group.

It involves rakats - a sequence of movements and postures such as standing, bowing, kneeling and touching the ground with the forehead while reciting specific verses from the Quran.

"Bowing, touching our forehead to the ground is showing humility to God," Fannoun said.

Each daily prayer has a different number of required rakats, ranging from two to four.

Many also worship on a prayer mat, though it's not required.

What does the law say about religious accommodation at work?

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

The law requires an employer or other covered entity to reasonably accommodate an employee's religious beliefs or practices, unless doing so would cause more than a minimal burden on the operations of the employer's business. This means an employer may be required to make reasonable adjustments to the work environment that will allow an employee to practice his or her religion.

Examples of some common religious accommodations include flexible scheduling, voluntary shift substitutions or swaps, job reassignments, and modifications to workplace policies or practices.

But in certain circumstances, employers don't have to make accommodations if they would cause "undue hardship" for the business. Several companies have said having multiple workers gone at the same time disrupts production.

More resources

* 5 books to read to better understand Islam

* Why Islam is on the rise worldwide

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We answer your questions about ritual prayer in Islam.

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The Art of Islam (Art History Documentary) | Perspective

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The Art of Islam (Art History Documentary) | Perspective

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How Muslim Art Challenges The Dark Ages Myth (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

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Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet is history in the present tense, telling the fascinating story of Muhammad through the lives of contemporary American Muslims. This is the biography of a man who changed the course of history 1,400 years ago, and lives today in the United States through the Americans who consider him to be a God's prophet.

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Watch Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet - UPF

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Start streaming now? Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet is history in the present tense, telling the fascinating story of Muhammad through the lives of contemporary American Muslims. This is the biography of a man who changed the course of history 1,400 years ago, and lives today in the United States through the Americans who consider him to be a God's prophet.

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Sneaking a Camera into Mecca to Film Hajj: The World's Largest Pilgrimage with Suroosh Alvi

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Explore the fact-checked online encyclopedia from Encyclopaedia Britannica with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and images from experts.

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Introduction to Sufism | Belief | Oprah Winfrey Network

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The Islamic Pilgrimage To Mecca Explained

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Full Length Film!

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The Quran translated into many languages in a simple and easy interface

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is the significance of Friday prayers in Islam?

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Last Friday, Muslims were killed while praying at two mosques in New Zealand. For Muslims, Friday is the day of gathering, the most important prayer day of the week.

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How To Attend a Muslim Friday Prayer Service (Jum’ah)

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The Hajj: Islamic Sacred Pilgrimage | PBS LearningMedia

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Explore the Hajj, the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, through the experience of present-day American Muslims and learn about the origins of Islam in its birthplace of Medina in this media gallery from Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler. According to Muslim tradition, all of the world's able-bodied believers must make the Hajj at least once in their lives.

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In his recent article, Sam Harris, a popular critic of Islam, referred to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist, as "the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in 1,000 years." Hidden in this comment is the idea that Malala's fellow Muslims are backward and that her religion, Islam, is not conducive to change or progress.

Conversely to the beliefs of Harris and others like him, Muslims have actually made enormous contributions to civilization, perhaps due to the heavy emphasis that Islam places on knowledge. People who forget or blatantly ignore major trends or events in world history can be said to suffer from "historical amnesia." Though this mindset cannot be cured in one short blog post, I hope to dispel some of the stereotypes and misperceptions exacerbated by Harris and other anti-Islam activists by highlighting the contributions that Muslims have made to civilization over the years.

Contributions to education

Malala's quest for universal education follows in Muslims' long and proud history in the field of education. Two Muslim women, Fatima and Miriam al-Firhi, created the world's first university, Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, in 859 AD. For several years, students were schooled here in a plethora of secular and religious subjects. At the end of their education, teachers evaluated students and awarded degrees based on satisfactory performances. The concept of awarding degrees would spread from Fez to Andalucía, Spain, and later to the Universities of Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England, among other places of learning.

Spanish Muslims of Andalucía were especially strong advocates of education and helped to dispel the gloom that had enveloped Europe during the Dark Ages. Between the 8th and 15th centuries, Andalucía was perhaps the world's epicenter for education and knowledge. Spanish universities such as those in Cordoba, Granada, and Seville, had Christian and Jewish students who learned science from Muslims. Women were also encouraged to study in Muslim Spain. This educational environment that stressed tolerance would not reach the "Western world" until the 19th and 20th centuries.

Contributions to philosophy

One of the greatest Muslim contributions to civilization began in the 8th century when Muslim scholars inherited volumes of Greek philosophy. The wisdom in ancient Greece texts, which had been lost to Europeans, was translated from Latin to Arabic by Muslim scholars, thus creating one of the greatest transmissions of knowledge in world history. Muslims scholars would eventually bring the ideas of great ancient Greek minds such as Socrates, Aristotle and Plato into Europe, where their philosophy was translated into other European languages. This is why Muslims are the main threshold behind the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment, two movements that resurrected Greek philosophy and gave new life into a European continent that was bogged down with religious dogma and bloody internal conflicts.

Many Muslim scholars made acquiring knowledge their life goal. Perhaps the most notable of these scholars is Al-Ghazali, a Sufi Muslim who in the 11th and 12th centuries revolutionized early Islamic philosophy by helping develop Neoplatonism, which is often described as the "mystical" or "religious" interpretation of Greek philosophy. At the time of Al-Ghazali's writing, Muslim philosophers had read about the ideas of ancient Greece, but these ideas were generally perceived to be in conflict with Islamic teachings. Al-Ghazali helped synthesize these elements by adopting the techniques of Aristotelian logic and the Neoplatonic ways to diminish the negative influences of excessive Islamic rationalism.

Ibn Khaldun is another one of the most important Muslim thinkers in history. Recognized as one of the greatest historians ever and the founder of sociological sciences in the 14th and 15th centuries, Khaldun created one of the earliest nonreligious philosophies in history in his work, the Muqaddimah. He also paved the way for our expectations of modern-day Presidents and Prime Ministers by creating a framework for evaluating "good rulers," stating "the sovereign exists for the good of the people... The necessity of a Ruler arises from the fact that human beings have to live together and unless there is some one to maintain order, society would break to pieces."

Contributions to health care

Medicine is another crucial contribution to civilization made by Muslims in addition to education and the university system. In 872 in Cairo, Egypt, the Ahmad ibn Tulun hospital was created and equipped with an elaborate institution and a range of functions. Like other Islamic hospitals that soon followed, Tulun was a secular institution open to men and women, adults and children, the rich and poor, as well as Muslims and non-Muslims. Tulun is also the earliest hospital to give care to the mentally ill.

One hundred years after the founding of Tulun, a surgeon named Al-Zahrawi, often called the "father of surgery," wrote an illustrated encyclopedia that would ultimately be used as a guide to European surgeons for the next five hundred years. Al-Zarawhi's surgical instruments, such as scalpels, bone saws, and forceps are still used by modern surgeons. Al-Zahrawi is also reportedly the first surgeon to perform a caesarean operation.

Another significant Muslim discovery came in the 13th century, when the Muslim medic Ibn Nafis described the pulmonary circulation almost three hundred years before William Harvey, the English physician who is believed by many Westerners to have "discovered" it. The technique of inoculation, or the introduction of an antigenic substance or vaccine into the body to induce immunity to a disease, is also said to have been designed by Muslims in Turkey and brought to Europe by the wife of England's Turkish ambassador in 1724.

Protecting and cleansing the body has always been a priority for Muslims. Perhaps then it is no surprised that Muslim scientists combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil to create a recipe for soap, which is still used today. Shampoo was also introduced to England on the Brighton seafront in 1759 at Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths.

There is also little doubt that the development of astronomy owes a great deal to the work of Muslim astronomers. As far back as the early 9th century, the Caliph Al-Ma'mum founded an astronomical observatory in Shammasiya in Baghdad and Qasiyun in Damascus. Five hundred years later, in 1420, Prince Ulugh Bey built a massive observatory in Samarqand, which was then followed in 1577 by another observatory built by Sultan Murad III in Istanbul.

The Ottomans had particularly well-organized astronomical institutions such as the post of chief-astronomer and time-keeping houses. Taqi al-Din, a 16th century Ottoman astronomer, created astronomical tables and observational instruments that helped measure the coordinates of stars and the distances between them.

Muslims have also made contributions in the field of chemistry by inventing many of the basic processes and apparatuses used by modern-day chemists. Working in the 8th and 9th centuries in Andalucía, Jabir Ibn Hayyan, the founder of modern chemistry, transformed alchemy into chemistry through distillation, or separating liquids through differences in their boiling points. In addition to developing the processes of crystallization, evaporation, and filtration, he also discovered sulphuric and nitric acid. The historian Erick John Holmyard stated that Hayyan's work is as important, if not more, than that of Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier, two European chemists who are frequently attributed to creating modern chemistry.

Indeed our very modern and globalized world today would not be able to move so quickly if it were not for the genius of Ibn Firnas, a Muslim engineer of Andalucía who in the 9th century constructed a flying machine, thus becoming the world's first aviator. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba, Spain, using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. Although he hoped to glide like an eagle, Ibn Firnas did not, though he is credited for creating the first parachute.

Muslims have also influenced the study of physics, a closely linked field to flying and aviation. Mohammad Abdus Salam, a Pakistani theoretical physicist, shared a 1979 Nobel Prize for his contribution to the field of theoretical physics, specifically in unifying electromagnetic and weak forces.

I have only scratched the surface of the contributions made by Muslims to the development of civilization. Children around the world should be taught about these contributions to dispel the misperception that Muslims are backward and stagnant. Muslims worldwide must also invest more in education, medicine, and other sciences in order to continue their tradition of being pioneers for knowledge.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Overcoming Historical Amnesia: Muslim Contributions to Civilization

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
People who forget or ignore major events in world history can be said to suffer from "historical amnesia." Though this mindset cannot be cured in one short blog post, I hope to dispel some of the stereotypes and misperceptions by highlighting the contributions that Muslims have made to civilization.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Islam, the Quran, and the Five Pillars: Crash Course World History #13

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Intro to Islam: The Muslim faith explained in 90 seconds