RE: What precisely is the greatest Muslim “contribution to science and engineering”?
I am quoting from Wikipedia in response to this question :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_medieval_Islam
“There are several different views on Islamic science among historians of science. The traditionalist view, as exemplified by Bertrand Russell, holds that Islamic science, while admirable in many technical ways, lacked the intellectual energy required for innovation and was chiefly important as a preserver of ancient knowledge and transmitter to medieval Europe.”
“The revisionist view, as exemplified by Abdus Salam, George Saliba and John M. Hobson holds that a Muslim scientific revolution occurred during the Middle Ages, an expression with which scholars such as Donald Routledge Hill and Ahmad Y Hassan express the view that Islam was the driving force behind the Muslim achievements, while Robert Briffault even sees Islamic science as the foundation of modern science.”
“The most prominent view in recent scholarship, however, as examplified by Toby E. Huff, Will Durant, Fielding H. Garrison, Muhammad Iqbal, Hossein Nasr and Bernard Lewis, holds that Muslim scientists did help in laying the foundations for an experimental science with their contributions to the scientific method and their empirical, experimental and quantitative approach to scientific inquiry, but that their work cannot be considered a Scientific Revolution, like that which occurred in early modern Europe and led to the emergence of modern science, with the exception of Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics which is widely considered a revolution in the fields of optics and visual perception.”
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It is revealing that the Muslim contributions to science (some of which were truly significant) largely ceased to advance after the 13th century, at which point it appears that Islamic scientific empiricism ran headlong into the stone wall of its obdurate faith.
“Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics which is widely considered a revolution in the fields of optics and visual perception.”
This poor guy spent plenty of time in Islamic prison in Egypt for his science, suffered far more so that the so called “whipping boy of medevial science” Nicolaus Copernicus that the left always seems to tout as an example of how “intolerant Christianity is to science “.