Who Gave Birth To Flight? A Muslim Physician Did!

[Bezerk]

Not many people know about this, but before Da vinci and the Wright brothers, a Muslim Physician was the first man to fly in the 9th Century!

Abdul Qasim 'Abbas ibn Firnas.

http://www.sultans-of-science.com/flight.htm



Saudi Aramco World : First Flights

First Flights

It took a special brand of courage for early "aviators" to defy gravity.

One afternoon in 875 A.D., before less than a dozen people gathered on a hill in Andulusia, Spain, history was in the making. In an attempt to "ascend like the birds," a man jumped from a wall built high over a valley. The resultant flight may very well have been man's first.

According to the notes of some of the scholars who witnessed it, this is what took place:

The tiny group had been called together by Abdul Qasim 'Abbas ibn Firnas. Most of those present were his friends, and by 875 they were used to being startled by the Muslim physician who practiced at the court in Cordoba. This day, however, one of them wrote, "We thought ibn Firnas certainly mad ... and we feared for his life!"

Ibn Firnas had met his friends in a suit of feathers, with the actual wings of two large birds attached to his arms and legs. After being helped to the top of a wall, which was later described as "several times the height of a man," he addressed the spectators below:

"Presently, I shall take leave of you. By guiding these wings up and down, I should ascend like the birds. If all goes well, after soaring for a time I should be able to return safely to your side."

Then, when a favoring wind appeared, ibn Firnas jumped from the wall. The onlookers gasped. They were certain the doctor would fall straight to the floor of the valley below.

Ibn Firnas did fall. But only for a spell.

Manipulating the two sets of wings in movements he had worked out on paper days before, he quickly checked his descent. Then he flailed his way to an altitude higher than the point from which he had taken off. Gliding for several hundred feet, he turned, then soared back. Exactly as he had promised, ibn Firnas landed on the wall.

"He flew a considerable distance as if he had been a bird," recorded one of the witnesses, "but in alighting again on the place where he started from, his back was very much hurt. For, not knowing that birds when they alight come down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one."

Despite the accident at the end (which did not prove serious), the performance had been extraordinary. But then, ibn Firnas was no ordinary man. In the best traditions of his period, he brilliantly spanned the worlds of art and science.

In addition to his medical duties at the Cordoba court, Firnas was a poet of fair accomplishment, a scientist of note, a student of music and the inventor of a simple metronome. In his home he had built a room in which, thanks to mechanisms hidden in the basement, spectators saw stars and clouds, and were astounded by thunder and lightning. The attempt to fly was only one of ibn Firnas' experiments. After lie had successfully demonstrated his theory, he quickly turned to other quests.

For a time, the excited conversations and writings of those who had seen the flight made ibn Firnas a famous man. One of these, the minor court poet, M'umin ibn Said, resented ibn Firnas. He criticized his metaphors and disapproved of his artificial thunder. But in 886 he wrote of the doctor (in a poem which scholars today regard as important scientific evidence):

He flew faster than the phoenix in his flight.

When he dressed his body in the feathers of a vulture.

Not long after the deaths of those who had seen the flight, ibn Firnas quietly dropped out of history. The noted Moroccan historian, al-Maqqari, would collect and publish most of the evidence of Firnas' rare accomplishments in the 17th century, but Maqqari's work went untranslated for over 200 years. The result is, even today, remarkably few historians have ever even heard of the versatile Muslim scientist.

There was something about flight which has always piqued man's imagination. Certainly thousands of men before ibn Firnas had dared to have the same dream—if not actually try it. Ibn Firnas, too, recognized that it was not an easy dream to catch and hold—even for a few exhilarating moments. "What man-made machine will ever achieve the complete perfection of even the goose's wing?" he once asked himself in a personal ledger. Indeed, it should be noted that even the gods themselves were not permitted to take the power of flight for granted.

Mexico's "Gods of the Air" were prone to falling into volcanoes. Crete's famed Icarus tried to go too high with his feather and waxen wings—and crashed. The egg of the fabulous roc that carried Sindbad, mortals are warned again and again, was the symbol of "something unattainable" to gods and mortals alike.

If preceding ibn Firnas into the skies were only such assorted and ill-fated creatures from mythology, many of the mortals who followed him proved to be equally unlucky.

After ibn Firnas, the next recorded attempt to fly was made in 1003 by the great Iranian student of Arabic philology, al-Jauhari. He met his death attempting to fly with the aid of an unknown apparatus from the roof of the old mosque of Nishapur in Khorosan. In 1010 came the flight of Eilmer of Malmesbury, a British Benedictine monk. Eilmer's first—and last—flight featured a set of rigid wings he had built of an unknown substance. After jumping out of a high tower, he reportedly glided 600 feet to a disastrous landing in which he broke both his legs. Like ibn Firnas, Eilmer had lacked a stabilizing tail structure such as that found on modern aircraft.

Next came a tragic Saracen, who stood in 1162 on a column in the Hippodrome of Constantinople equipped with a sail-like cloak. He gathered the air for flight and jumped only to crash to his death. There followed Father John Dampier, an Englishman who is said by a contemporary to have taken off from the walls of Sterling Castle "on hens feathers without fatal consequences." Kaspar Mohr, the flying priest of Wurttemberg, also flew, but no one is sure of how he came out of it.

Marco Polo wrote of man-carrying kites he had seen in east Asia. His story set many in the Middle Ages to pondering the secret of human flight with kites and similar apparatus, none of which worked. It remained for Leonardo da Vinci, in the sixteenth century, to lead scientific thought around that particular impasse and back to the sounder thinking of ibn Firnas. Like ibn Firnas, da Vinci felt the answer was locked in the mystery of birds. Although he did not attempt to fly himself, the Italian genius did spend a number of years studying and dissecting various fowl, and on paper at least he invented a bird-winged machine designed to be strapped to a man's back.

Perhaps the most glorious moment in the history of human flight by machine came in December 1903, when on another hill far away from Andulusia two American brothers named Wright contrived to stay up in the air in their machine for 12 seconds and fly 120 feet. Their's was a fitting link in the chain of airborne courage pioneered by an inquisitive Muslim doctor in 875 A.D.

This article appeared on pages 8-9 of the January/February 1964 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

Statues of Abbas Ibn Firnas

[Neo]

I thought it was Leonardi da Vinci who tried it first.

[Bezerk]

Originally Posted by Neo

I thought it was Leonardi da Vinci who tried it first.

A lot of people thought that he did. But this is now coming out and I saw GIANT posters today on university campus and roads where it said that "Before Wright brothers, It was Abbas Ibn Firnas".

I can't believe people didn't know about this.

[ARSENAL6]

there have ben so many discovery done by msulims
but have been deleted by the west just show that Islam and Muslim to be Babarric backward nation.

[Bezerk]

Originally Posted by ARSENAL6

there have ben so many discovery done by msulims
but have been deleted by the west just show that Islam and Muslim to be Babarric backward nation.

Exactly. The Muslims astronomers were never recognized or given credit for most of their work. Tens and thousands of research and manuscripts are scattered all over the world yet people still think that in ancient Muslim world, all we knew was the art of warfare.

[Bane Blade]

It is a fact that during the Ummayad dynasty every book Muslims could get their hands on got translated into Arabic, this made it easy for Muslim scientists to progress, the movements name was translation movement and it gave science a freedom to communicate from Spain to Yemen, it helped ideas being shared and a lot of cures being made for a lot of diseases a lot of progress in Math the invention of the decimal system the understanding of the Earths shape and the calculation of its diameter all the way to the betterment in Warfare technology and how to make weapons more effective.

[ARSENAL6]

Originally Posted by Bezerk

Exactly. The Muslims astronomers were never recognized or given credit for most of their work. Tens and thousands of research and manuscripts are scattered all over the world yet people still think that in ancient Muslim world, all we knew was the art of warfare.

Did you know that Muslims were the first to discover South and North America ?

It only came obvoius to me , Muslim invented the Map

the Cheeokee Red Indian Tribe metion about Muslim explores

Heres are link for Red Indians:

My name is Mahir Abdal-Razzaaq El and I am a Cherokee Blackfoot American Indian who is Muslim. I am known as Eagle Sun Walker. I serve as a Pipe Carrier Warrior for the Northeastern Band of Cherokee Indians in New York City.

There are other Muslims in our group. For the most part, not many people are aware of the Native American contact with Islam that began over one thousand years ago by some of the early Muslim travelers who visited us. Some of these Muslim travelers ended up living among our people.

For most Muslims and non-Muslims of today, this type of information is unknown and has never been mentioned in any of the history books. There are many documents, treaties, legislation and resolutions that were passed between 1600s and 1800s that show that Muslims were in fact here and were very active in the comunities in which they lived. Treaties such as Peace and Friendship that was signed on the Delaware River in the year 1787 bear the signatures of Abdel-Khak and Muhammad Ibn Abdullah. This treaty details our continued right to exist as a community in the areas of commerce, maritime shipping, current form of government at that time which was in accordance with Islam. According to a federal court case from the Continental Congress, we help put the breath of life in to the newly framed constitution. All of the documents are presently in the National Archives as well as the Library of Congress.

If you have access to records in the state of South Carolina, read the Moors Sundry Act of 1790. In a future article, Inshallah, I will go in to more details about the various tribes, their languages; in which some are influenced by Arabic, Persian, Hebrew words. Almost all of the tribes vocabulary include the word Allah. The traditional dress code for Indian women includes the kimah and long dresses. For men, standard fare is turbans and long tops that come down to the knees. If you were to look at any of the old books on Cherokee clothing up until the time of 1832, you will see the men wearing turbans and the women wearing long head coverings. The last Cherokee chief who had a Muslim name was Ramadhan Ibn Wati of the Cherokees in 1866.

Cities across the United States and Canada bear names that are of Indian and Islamic derivation. Have you ever wondered what the name Tallahassee means? It means that He Allah will deliver you sometime in the future.

CHEROKEE NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN MUSLIMS

Turtle Island Muslims


Islam in Brazil:
Islam in Brazil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Heres somthing on rocket technology:

Rocket artillery
A military tactic developed by Tippu Sultan and his father, Haidar Ali was the use of mass attacks with rocket brigades on infantry formations. Tippu Sultan wrote a military manual called Fathul Mujahidin in which 200 rocket men were prescribed to each Mysorean "cushoon" (brigade). Mysore had 16 to 24 cushoons of infantry. The areas of town where rockets and fireworks were manufactured were known as Taramandal Pet ("Galaxy Market").

The rocket men were trained to launch their rockets at an angle calculated from the diameter of the cylinder and the distance of the target. In addition, wheeled rocket launchers capable of launching five to ten rockets almost simultaneously were used in war. Rockets could be of various sizes, but usually consisted of a tube of soft hammered iron about 8" long and 1½ - 3" diameter, closed at one end and strapped to a shaft of bamboo about 4ft. long. The iron tube acted as a combustion chamber and contained well packed black powder propellant. A rocket carrying about one pound of powder could travel almost 1,000 yards. In contrast, rockets in Europe not being iron cased, could not take large chamber pressures and as a consequence, were not capable of reaching distances anywhere near as great.[42]

Haidar Ali's father, the Naik or chief constable at Budikote, commanded 50 rocketmen for the Nawab of Arcot. There was a regular Rocket Corps in the Mysore Army, beginning with about 1200 men in Haidar Ali's time. At the Battle of Pollilur (1780), during the Second Anglo-Mysore War, Colonel William Braille's ammunition stores are thought to have been detonated by a hit from one of Haidar Ali's Mysore rockets resulting in a humiliating British defeat.

In the Third Anglo-Mysore War of 1792, there is mention of two rocket units fielded by Tipu Sultan, 120 men and 131 men respectively. Lt. Col. Knox was attacked by rockets near Srirangapatna on the night of 6 February 1792, while advancing towards the Kaveri river from the north. The Rocket Corps ultimately reached a strength of about 5000 in Tipu Sultan's army. Mysore rockets were also used for ceremonial purposes. When the Jacobin Club of Mysore sent a delegation to Tippu Sultan, 500 rockets were launched as part of the gun salute.

During the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, rockets were again used on several occasions. One of these involved Colonel Arthur Wellesley, later famous as the First Duke of Wellington. Arthur Wellesley was defeated by Tipu's Diwan, Purnaiya at the Battle of Sultanpet Tope. Quoting Forrest,

"At this point (near the village of Sultanpet, Figure 5) there was a large tope, or grove, which gave shelter to Tipu's rocketmen and had obviously to be cleaned out before the siege could be pressed closer to Srirangapattana island. The commander chosen for this operation was Col. Wellesley, but advancing towards the tope after dark on the 5 April 1799, he was set upon with rockets and musket-fires, lost his way and, as Beatson politely puts it, had to "postpone the attack" until a more favourable opportunity should offer.[43]

The following day, Wellesley launched a fresh attack with a larger force, and took the whole position without losing a single man.[44] On 22 April 1799, twelve days before the main battle, rocketeers worked their way around to the rear of the British encampment, then 'threw a great number of rockets at the same instant' to signal the beginning of an assault by 6,000 Indian infantry and a corps of Frenchmen, all directed by Mir Golam Hussain and Mohomed Hulleen Mir Mirans. The rockets had a range of about 1,000 yards. Some burst in the air like shells. Others called ground rockets, on striking the ground, would rise again and bound along in a serpentine motion until their force was spent. According to one British observer, a young English officer named Bayly:

"So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger from the destructive missiles ...". He continued: "The rockets and musketry from 20,000 of the enemy were incessant. No hail could be thicker. Every illumination of blue lights was accompanied by a shower of rockets, some of which entered the head of the column, passing through to the rear, causing death, wounds, and dreadful lacerations from the long bamboos of twenty or thirty feet, which are invariably attached to them'."

During the conclusive British attack on Srirangapattana on May 2,1799, a British shot struck a magazine of rockets within the Tipu Sultan's fort causing it to explode and send a towering cloud of black smoke, with cascades of exploding white light, rising up from the battlements. On the afternoon of 4 May when the final attack on the fort was led by Baird, he was again met by "furious musket and rocket fire", but this did not help much; in about an hour's time the Fort was taken; perhaps in another hour Tipu had been shot (the precise time of his death is not known), and the war was effectively over.[45]

After the fall of Srirangapattana, 600 launchers, 700 serviceable rockets and 9,000 empty rockets were found. Some of the rockets had pierced cylinders, to allow them to act like incendiaries, while some had iron points or steel blades bound to the bamboo. By attaching these blades to rockets they became very unstable towards the end of their flight causing the blades to spin around like flying scythes, cutting down all in their path.

These experiences eventually led to the Royal Woolwich Arsenal's beginning a military rocket R&D program in 1801, their first demonstration of solid-fuel rockets in 1805 and publication of A Concise Account of the Origin and Progress of the Rocket System in 1807 by William Congreve,[46] son of the arsenal's commandant. Congreve rockets were soon systematically used by the British during the Napoleonic Wars and their confrontation with the US during 1812-14. These descendants of Mysore rockets find mention in the Star Spangled Banner.

Fathul Mujahidin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



I think we need to compile a list of the things that Islam did to help the West.

[Bezerk]

The great European Theologian, Thomas Aquinas used the writings and manuscripts of Muslim Scholar Ibn Rushd, known as "Avveroes" in europe, which ultimately helped the European Renaissance.

There's tons of material in the "Reference" section of this Wikipedia article on Avveroes. It's a well maintained and legit Article. Give it a read!

Averroes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[AliFarooq]

YouTube - 20 Great Discoveries by MUSLIMS

YouTube - 20 Great Discoveries by MUSLIMS

[AliFarooq]

YouTube - Huge and awesome scientific discoveries made by Muslims !

YouTube - Huge and awesome scientific discoveries made by Muslims !

YouTube - Discover the Muslim origins of many Western discoveries!

YouTube - Discover the Muslim origins of many Western discoveries!

[BelligerentPacifist]

I only came to know about him ~9 years ago when I was reading about some ancient inventions.

The Wright biraadaraan are nowhere known as the pioneers of flight, just those of 'powered' flight.

[TexasJohn]

Arsenal6 - Tallahassee does not mean "Allah will deliver you....etc"

Tallahassee (Florida, United States) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Hernando de Soto passed through the Apalachee country of northern Florida in 1539. The natives’ name for their chief village was Tallahassee, meaning "old town." This Indian word was given to the site selected in 1824 as the capital of the Florida Territory. The city remained the capital when Florida became a state in 1845.

[ARSENAL6]

Originally Posted by TexasJohn

Arsenal6 - Tallahassee does not mean "Allah will deliver you....etc"

Tallahassee (Florida, United States) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Hernando de Soto passed through the Apalachee country of northern Florida in 1539. The natives’ name for their chief village was Tallahassee, meaning "old town." This Indian word was given to the site selected in 1824 as the capital of the Florida Territory. The city remained the capital when Florida became a state in 1845.

It depends what you want to believe Its his word against yours , I'm just posting what was there.
Hoiwever it is kinda remarkble to see Muslim in AMerica way before creation of the USA

[TexasJohn]

Originally Posted by ARSENAL6

It depends what you want to believe Its his word against yours , I'm just posting what was there.
Hoiwever it is kinda remarkble to see Muslim in AMerica way before creation of the USA

Well, it's not my word it's Britannica's. However, you are correct in that the ancient mariners from many countries, including China sailed to the Americas and traded. The Incas and Mayans were very knowlegdable people as were the ancient Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern countries. I really don't know how old Islam is - perhaps you can enlighten me there!

It is now known that the Egyptians had knowledge of gliders.

[roadrunner]

It is true that Muslims did invent stuff. Westerners copied some of the Muslims stuff and said they invented it to a degree.

The biggest case of denial I see amongst those far right Europeans/Americans whichever, that claim non Europeans do not invent stuff.

History has shown that the inventions can be reasonably evenly distributed to Muslims during the Golden era of Cordoba and so on, the Indus Valley Civilization and Vedic era Gandhara astronomy was another period of serious non European invention (in fact many Europeans simply copied their ideas and regurgitated them as their own), and the Chinese with their own hey day of inventions.

But also we Muslims are not innocent enitrely. If you watch this clip. The guy goes on about the numeric system being a Muslim "invention". It was not - neither was it a Hindu invention. It was an invention by the people of pre-islamic Pakistan, probably Gandhara's shunya. Those people were not Muslim, though you might be justified in claiming it as a Muslim invention since their descendants are Muslim.

Originally Posted by AliFarooq

YouTube - Huge and awesome scientific discoveries made by Muslims !

Another thing is that talking of Muslim inventions sounds a bit silly to me. Inventions were built on ideas of past and present. I know many Christians, Hindus and so on proudly boast that Muslims don't invent stuff and lag behind in science. That isn't true and we all know it. During the Muslim hey day, many inventions were made. However to talk of "Muslim inventions" sounds silly to me.