The launch of the national exhibition '1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World' has generated some fantastic media coverage including a double page feature in the Independent last Saturday.
The paper's Paul Vallely focused in on 20 of the most influential innovations, from coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, which some of us take for granted in daily life. It's great that he picked up on the power of the exhibition, really bringing history to life, by showing the cultural cross-fertlisation which took place in an amazingly creative period in Muslim history, which in Europe at the time is regarded traditionally as 'the Dark Ages'. In fact the coverage of the exhibition currently based in Manchester but shortly to tour nationally, has ranged from local to global, across a range of outlets, is an impressive feat in itself set against the problems of Islamophobia. It even made it into that secular temple of geekdom Slashdot.
As well as press and broadcast stories we are obviously particularly proud of the 1001 inventions website, for example the tag cloud which displays English language terms with origins in Arabic which on clicking on each word takes you to a page that gives you a wikipedia definition of that word, images tagged with that word from Flickr, books from Amazon, and links from Google.
While the exhibition is aimed at young people in particular, it's no doubt of interest to anyone curious about how the West has benefited from this rich vein of Muslim history. Indeed when the very idea of 'innovation' is such a fashionable topic in business its valuable to see from the site how it often came about as the result of chance and observation. For example the creation of coffee is credited to an Arab man named Khalid who tending goats noticed the animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled these to make the first coffee!
Further coverage of the exhibition:
Just like the movement of the 1950's in the Soviet Union, aiming to prove that "Russians invented everything"! Most of the so-called Islamic inventions cited were not made by Muslims at all. And anyway this is all pre-scientific stuff of a thousand years ago. What have you done for us recently? That was then; this is now!