Muslim scholars forgotten in school textbooks

When Baghdad lit up the world

In Europe, many still imagine the Middle Ages as a long night where science slept almost entirely until the Renaissance. However, while certain European cities lived to the rhythm of famines, wars and epidemics, Baghdad, founded in the 8th century, became one of the greatest intellectual centers on the planet. Around the year 830, the caliph Al-Ma’mûn created the famous Bayt al-Hikmathe House of Wisdom. Greek, Persian and Indian works are translated, but above all, we criticize them, we complete them, we go beyond them. Astronomers observe the sky from giant observatories. Mathematicians invent new calculation methods. Doctors compile knowledge from several continents.

It is in this context that Al-Khawarizmi, born around 780, appears. His work on al-jabr will give rise to the word “algebra”. Behind this term which still frightens generations of students lies an immense revolution: solving abstract problems with universal methods. Without this work, there would be neither modern computing, nor artificial intelligence, nor even everyday banking calculations. Irony of history: the word “algorithm” comes directly from the Latinization of its name. A few decades later, Ibn Al-Haytham, born around 965 in Basra, transformed the way we understand human vision. While many still think that the eyes project rays toward objects, he demonstrates that light enters the eye. But above all, he experiments. He observes. He doubts. He starts again. This method based on concrete experience already announces the modern scientific approach, several centuries before Bacon or Descartes.

Cordoba, Cairo, Damascus: a civilization of knowledge

Muslim intellectual history is often reduced to Baghdad, but knowledge then circulated from one city to another like an immense breath. In Córdoba, in Muslim Andalusia, libraries sometimes contained hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in the 10th century. At the same time, in certain regions of Europe, owning a few dozen books was already an absolute luxury. Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was born in 980 in what is now Uzbekistan. Doctor, philosopher, scientist, he writes The Canon of Medicinea monumental medical encyclopedia which remained taught in several European universities until the 17th century. For centuries, French or Italian students learned medicine from a work written by a Persian Muslim scholar.

In the 12th century, Al-Idrissi drew one of the most precise world maps of his time for King Roger II of Sicily. He travels, collects stories, compares information from sailors and traders. His work shows a connected world, crossed by exchanges, far from the clichés of a frozen Middle Ages. And then there are these details that we use without even noticing them. The so-called “Arabic” figures come from India but pass through Muslim scholars before reaching Europe. The stars still have Arabic names: Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Altaïr. Even some navigational instruments later used by Europeans were perfected in the Muslim world.

Why was this memory erased?

The question is disturbing because it touches on the way in which societies talk about their own greatness. From the 19th century, during European colonial expansion, it became useful to present the Muslim world as a backward space, incapable of innovation, locked in religion and emotion. Fully recognizing his scientific legacy complicated this narrative. School programs then often simplified history: ancient Greece, then suddenly modern Europe. Between the two, an immense void. As if eight centuries of research, translations, experiments and intellectual debates had been only a secondary detail.

This disappearance still has effects today. Many young Muslims grow up with the implicit idea that their ancestors would have left behind palaces, battles or religious conflicts. Rarely laboratories, libraries or scientific discoveries. Perhaps the most unfair thing is here: these scientists did not work only “for Muslims”. They worked for human knowledge. Their books circulated between languages ​​and continents. They belong as much to universal history as Einstein or Galileo.

Rediscover a memory without falling into nostalgia

Rehabilitating these figures does not mean transforming the Muslim past into a perfect golden age. This would be another way of falsifying history. The Muslim world has experienced its divisions, its political violence, its periods of stagnation too. But recognizing a forgotten contribution allows us to escape from a caricatured vision where certain civilizations are naturally destined for progress while others remain condemned to backwardness. When a teenager discovers that Ibn Nafis described pulmonary circulation in the 13th century, long before William Harvey, or that a woman like Mariam Al-Ijliya made sophisticated astrolabes in 10th century Syria, something changes in his outlook. History ceases to be a museum reserved for a few peoples.

And maybe that’s the real issue. Not in an identity competition between civilizations, but in the repair of a common memory. Because a school that voluntarily forgets certain hands that constructed knowledge ends up creating generations who believe that intelligence always belongs to the same people.