Introduction
During the medieval era, Muslim Scientists dominated the world with their amazing discoveries. Similarly, Muslim Scientists contributed to almost all the significant fields of science including Astronomy, Astrology, Physiology, Chemistry, Economics, Physics, Mathematics, Geography, Sociology, Philosophy, Music, and Engineering. In this article, I will describe all the Major Muslim Scientists who significantly contributed to and changed the discourse of the world remarkably, during the medieval ages. Let's now have a look at them one by one.
1. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
Al-Khwarizmi was a Persian polymath from Khwarazm who lived from 780 to 850 CE. He wrote astronomical, geographical, and mathematical works that had a huge impact. He was given the position of astronomer and head of the library at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad around 820 CE.
The first methodical solution of linear and quadratic equations was provided in Al-Khwarizmi's popular algebra treatise. His demonstration of how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, for which he provided geometric justifications, was one of his greatest achievements in algebra.
He has been referred to as the "father" or "founder" of algebra because he was the first to treat algebra as a separate subject and introduced the concepts of "reduction" and "balancing" (the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation).
The title of his book, al-jabr, means "completion" or "rejoining." In the 12th century, Latin translations of his arithmetic textbook Algorithmo de Numero Indorum, which codified the various Indian numerals, introduced the decimal positional number system to the Western world. This is where the term algebra comes from.
The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, which Robert of Chester translated into Latin in 1145, served as the primary mathematical textbook for European universities until the sixteenth century. He revised Ptolemy's Geography and listed the longitudes and latitudes of various cities and towns, in addition to his most well-known works.
He also wrote about calendar works, the astrolabe, and the sundial and produced a set of astronomical tables. In addition, he made significant contributions to trigonometry by creating the first table of tangents and precise sine and cosine tables.
2. Hasan Ibn al-Haytham
"The father of modern optics," Asan Ibn al-Haytham was a medieval mathematician, astronomer, and physicist from present-day Iraq who lived from 965 to 1040 CE. He made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular.
His most significant work is the "Book of Optics," which he wrote between the years 1011 and 1021 and has survived in a Latin translation. Five centuries before Renaissance scientists, Ibn al-Haytham was an early proponent of the idea that a hypothesis must be supported by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematical evidence.
He is sometimes referred to as the "first true scientist" in the world for this reason. He also wrote about philosophy, theology, and medicine, making him a polymath. Ibn al-Haytham was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflects from an object and reaches the eye.
He also argued that vision takes place in the brain and is subjective and influenced by personal experience. He was born in Basra, but spent most of his productive life in Cairo, the Fatimid capital, where he wrote a number of treatises and taught nobilities. Abu'l-Hasan Bayhaqi called Al-Haytham the "Second Ptolemy," and John Peckham called him "The Physicist." Physical optics as we know it today can be traced back to Ibn al-Haytham.
3. Ibne Sina
Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna in the West, was a Persian polymath who lived from 980 to 1037 CE. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine and one of the most important physicians, astronomers, philosophers, and writers of the Islamic Golden Age.
Avicenna has been described as "arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era" by Sajjad H. Rizvi. He was a Muslim philosopher who practiced peripatetics and was influenced by Greek Aristotelian thought. Around 240 of his 450 works, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine, are known to have survived.
His philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, The Book of Healing, and his medical encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine, which became the standard medical text at many medieval universities and continued to be used until 1650, are his most well-known works.
Avicenna wrote about astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, and poetry in addition to philosophy and medicine.
4. Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni
Al-Biruni, or Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, was a Khwarazmian Iranian scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age. He lived from 973 to 1050. He has been referred to as "the first anthropologist," "Father of modern geodesy," "Father of Comparative Religion," and "founder of Indology."
Al-Biruni distinguished himself as a historian, chronologist, and linguist in addition to being knowledgeable in the natural sciences, physics, mathematics, and astronomy. He was rewarded abundantly for his tireless research in numerous fields of knowledge and studied nearly all of the sciences of his time.
Al-Biruni's research was supported by the rich and famous, and they sought him out for specific projects. Al-Biruni was a powerful individual on his own, but he was also influenced by philosophers from other cultures, like the Greeks, whom he looked to for inspiration when he started studying philosophy. He knew Khwarezmian, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit, as well as Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac.
He was a gifted linguist. He spent much of his life in Ghazni, which is now in modern-day central-eastern Afghanistan and was the capital of the Ghaznavids at the time. After exploring the Hindu faith practiced in India, he traveled to the Indian subcontinent in 1017 and wrote a treatise on Indian culture titled Trkh al-Hind (History of India).
He was an admirably objective writer on the customs and creeds of various nations for his time, and his scholarly objectivity earned him the title al-Ustadh ("The Master") in recognition of his remarkable description of early 11th-century India.
5. Jabir Ibne Hayyan
The author of the vast number and variety of Arabic works known as the Jabirian corpus is Ab Ms. Jabir Ibne Hayyan (746–816). The majority of the works that have survived today deal with magic, chemistry, alchemy, and Shi'ite religious philosophy.
However, the original corpus covered a wide range of subjects, including metaphysics, logic, astrology, medicine, pharmacology, zoology, and botany, as well as cosmology, astronomy, and astrology.
The oldest systematic classification of chemical substances and instructions for chemically obtaining an inorganic compound like sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride from organic materials like plants, blood, and hair can be found in Jabir's works. One of the earliest known versions of the sulfur-mercury theory of metals, a mineralogical theory that remained prevalent until the 18th century, can also be found in his works.
"The science of the balance," or "the science of the balance" in Arabic, served as a philosophical framework for a significant portion of Jabir's writings. 'Ilm al-man,' whose goal was to distill all phenomena down to a system of measures and quantitative proportions, including material substances and their components.
Some of the earliest Shi'ite eschatological, soteriological, and immunological doctrines that Jabir claimed to have derived from his alleged master, the Shi'ite Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, are also contained in the works of Jabir. In Islamic academic circles, the identity of Jabir and the precise corpus of his works were up for debate as early as the 10th century.
Modern scholars also question the existence of a historical Jabir and the authorship of all of these works by a single individual. Instead, it is thought that a school of Shi'ite alchemists writing in the late 9th and early 10th centuries used Jabir ibn Hayyan as a pseudonym.
6. Isahaque Al Kindi
Ab Yusuf Yaqub Ibne Isahaque al-Kind was an Arab Muslim philosopher, polymath, mathematician, physician, and music theorist who lived from 801 to 873 AD. Al-Kindi is regarded as the "father of Arab philosophy" for being the first of the Islamic peripatetic philosophers.
Isahaque Al-Kindi was raised in Baghdad and was born in Kufa. He rose to prominence in the House of Wisdom and was appointed by a number of Abbasid Caliphs to oversee the translation of Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic. He synthesized, adapted, and promoted Hellenistic and Peripatetic philosophy in the Muslim world as a result of this contact with "the philosophy of the ancients," as Muslim scholars frequently referred to Hellenistic philosophy.
After that, he wrote hundreds of his own original treatises on a variety of topics, including metaphysics, ethics, logic, psychology, medicine, pharmacology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, and optics. He also wrote on more practical topics, such as perfumes, swords, jewels, glass, dyes, zoology, tides, mirrors, meteorology, and earthquakes.
Additionally, Al-Kindi was a pioneer in the field of cryptography. The compatibility of philosophy and other "orthodox" Islamic sciences, particularly theology, is the central theme of Al-Kindi's philosophical writings. Many of his works deal with topics that theology was immediately interested in. The soul, God's nature, and prophetic knowledge are among these.
7. Moulana Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi
Moulana Jalaluddin Muhammad Rumi, more commonly referred to as Moulana Rumi, was a Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and theologian from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran in the 13th century. Rumi's influence extends beyond ethnic and national boundaries.
Over the course of seven centuries, Muslims in Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Pashtuns, Turks, Greeks, Iranians, and other Muslims have greatly valued his spiritual legacy. Numerous translations and transpositions of his poems into various formats have occurred. In the United States, Rumi has been called the "most popular poet" and the "best-selling poet."
Although Rumi wrote most of his works in Persian, he occasionally used Turkish, Arabic, and Greek in his verse. His Masnavi (Mathnawi), written in Konya, is regarded as one of the greatest Persian poems ever written. In their original languages, his works are still widely read today throughout Greater Iran and the Persian-speaking world.
His works are translated into many languages, especially in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the United States, and South Asia. His poetry has had an impact not only on Persian literature but also on Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Urdu, Bengali, and Pashto literary traditions.
8. Abdul Rehman Ibne Khaldoon
Abdul Rehman Ibne Khaldoon was an Arab sociologist, philosopher, and historian who lived from 1332 to 1406 AD. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages. He made significant contributions to historiography, sociology, economics, and demography.
His most popular book, the Muqaddimah or Prolegomena ("Presentation"), which he wrote in a half year as he states in his self-portrayal, impacted seventeenth 100 years and nineteenth-century Ottoman history specialists, for example, Katip Celebi, Mustafa Naima, and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, who utilized its speculations to break down the development and decay of the Ottoman Domain.
Ibne Khaldun talked to Tamerlane, the Timurid Empire's founder. Ibn Khaldun's writings have recently been compared to those of influential European philosophers like Niccol Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Auguste Comte, as well as the economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith.
This comparison suggests that Ibn Khaldun's ideas predated (but did not directly influence) those of these influential European philosophers. He has also had an impact on Reaganomics and on some contemporary Islamic thinkers, such as those who adhere to the traditionalist school.
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