Things you don’t know about Muslims part 1

There are many things that we all know about Islam and Muslims today, if you’ve missed out then just turn on the news and you’ll hear endless negative reports, it’s almost as if a day does not go by without some Muslim or the religion of Islam being blamed for something. That’s not what I want to do in this hub, today I’d like to bring another dimension to the discussion and that is to briefly list 2 of the most common contributions that the Muslims have given to the world which we increasingly use today.

Let’s start with the first, many of us drink coffee today and most people would not know the origins of Coffee. The story starts with a man named Khalid he was tending his goats, when he noticed his wonderful goats became livelier after eating a type of berry. He decided to try them himself and boiled the berries to make the world’s first coffee (as we now know it). The first records show that the beans were exported from Ethiopia (Khalid’s homeland) to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray. During the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It then arrived in England during 1650 introduced by a Turkish man named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic name for coffee was qahwa which became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.

Second in my list is the humble airplane, we all fly today from country to country and many would attribute the first flights to the Wright brothers but what they fail to realise is that a thousand years before Wright brothers a Muslim engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he attempted his first flight by jumping from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using nothing more than a loose cloak reinforced with wooden struts. He was hoping to glide like a bird. Unfortunately he didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute. He carried on with his attempts and in 875, aged 70 he perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers strung together he tried again, jumping from a mountain (at age 70 that man must have been on something strong). He flew to a significant height and stayed airborne for ten minutes but crashed on landing – to conclude that it was because he had not given his flying device a tail so it would stall on landing that as we know today is correct.

You’ll very rarely hear a Muslim being mentioned or any small invention being attributed to a Muslim person. When a Muslim does something wrong only then will you here it being attributed to a Muslim or Islam and no time or money spared in publicising it and criticising the religion of Islam. Why is that I ask?