The 1,001 Inventions Tour is a Fraud & The Golden Age is a Myth

Contention 1 - The 1,001 Inventions Exhibit is a Fraud I challenge my opponent to present as many of these 1,001 inventions because I have yet to find any such list leading me to conclude that so far it is actually a handful of inventions. I will provide four examples to illustrate my point and I cannot help but scoff: A) Coffee - for me this highlights the absurdity of the exhibit given that a beverage would hardly qualify as what we would consider a scientific invention and demonstrates a type of desperation to form a list. Khalid, the individual credited with the discovery of coffee, was an Abyssinian orthodox Christian and goat herder. He shared his discovery with the local monastery. So why is this discovery to be taken as a significant scientific discovery aside from the popularity as a beverage and why do Muslims get credit? B) Chess - again, what does a popular game, which I happen to enjoy very much, have to do with scientific invention? The game originated in India and was taken up by the Persians prior to the Islamic conquest and it was called chatrang. It differed from the game of chess we have today and the exact rules are unknown. So why do Muslims get credit for a game they didn't originate and a game that was really developed by Europeans as a part of noble culture while going on to become an intellectual sport of sorts? Archaeologists have also uncovered Byzantine chess set dating back to the 6th century showing it was in Europe before Islam and it is worth noting chess is literally forbidden by the prophet Muhammad who compared playing it to washing your hands in the flesh and blood of swine. C) Windmill - I find it interesting that this claim is that it was invented for a Persian Caliph in 634. There was no Caliph in Persia, this was the year Persia was invaded by the Muslims, and in fact the Caliph Umar was assassinated at mosque in Medina by a Muslim slave in 644 who was described as a builder of windmills. So this proves to be an example of Muslims stealing credit for an invention that was taken upon their conquest. Furthermore, the Greeks wrote about watermills in books like Pneumatica and they were called hydraletes. D) Flying - this is one of the most frivolous claims of all asserting that a Muslim jumping off the roof of a mosque with a cloak of wooden struts and feathers is used to strip the achievement of the Wright Brothers for their pioneering and inventing the world's first successful airplane used to conduct the first powered, sustained flight in 1903 using concepts like the lift equation. It would be like crediting the Greeks for flight because of the mythology surrounding Icarus. It wasn't an invention or a discovery. The ancient Chinese attempted to construct flying machines and the ancient Greek invention of the aeolipile was clearly significant given using jets of steam to create rotary motion. Contention 2 - The Qu'ran & Scientific Blunders Muslim apologists engages in daw'ha (Islamic proselytizing) that shamelessly peddles frivolous propaganda to make the claim that the Qu'ran contains scientific miracles, but in reality there are clear examples of scientific blunders. A) Flat Earth - In S. 15:19, S. 20:53, S. 43:10, and other verses in the Qu'ran, it is repeatedly said the earth is flat - "...the earth (like a carpet) spread out." Shaykh Abdul-Aziz Ibn Baaz, the former supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, has reaffirmed this view. Also, Muslims make prayer (salat) in the direction (qiblah) of Meeca, but this requires a flat earth otherwise all those prayers would actually be toward space. An Iraqi "scientist" has defended this view on Iraqi television. B) Shooting Stars - In S. 67:5 the Qu'ran informs Muslims that shooting stars, actually meteorites, are allah's missiles fired upon devils. An obvious absurdity contained in the supposedly perfect book of Muslims. C) Sperm - In S. 86:6-7 the Qu'ran informs Muslims that we are created from a drop emitted (sperm) that comes from between the ribs and back. We obviously know today that sperm comes from the testicles and the pelvic region. Also, it should be noted that it says we are created from sperm alone failing to mention the female ovum. D) Embryonic Blood Clot Stage - According to S. 96:2, we go through a stage of development where apparently we are but a clot of blood. This is utter nonsense and the authors of the Qu'ran must have take a woman's menstural cycle to form such an erroenous conclusion. E) A Barrier Between Saltwater and Freshwater - In S. 25:53 the Qu'ran informs Muslims that the separation between saltwater and freshwater is permanent, but this is wrong because an estuary creates a transition where freshwater is kept separate temporarily until the salinity levels eventually homogenize. Contention 3 - The Golden Age Myth The Golden Age is a myth built upon another myth that Europe was in the Dark Ages, which is currently regarded it as an inaccurate term to describe the Medieval Period following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. An example is the widely held myth that Europeans believed the earth was flat when in fact the Greeks were writing about a spherical earth as early as 500 B.C., Thomas Aquinas stated the roundess of the earth in Summa theologiae, and it was stated as a fact in the book On the Sphere of the World, which was the most influential astronomy book of the 13th century. The reason Islam spanned from Spain to India was due to the fact that the companions of Muhammad conquered a territory of 5 million square miles by the sword and appropriated the wealth of all those they conquered while having a large population of dhimmis paying their protection money (jizya). Contention 4 - Muslim contribution to Modern Science is Nothing Muslims have played no role in the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution or the Information Age. Spain, for example, translates more educational material each year than the Islamic world has since the 9th century. Today, we should ask ourselves how many Nobel Prize winners have Muslims produced, which can be counted on one's hand and include unrepentant terrorist Yasser Arafat and Nasser. Two-thirds of Ph.Ds in Saudi Arabia, for example, have a degree in some type of Islamic study and the mufti of Saudi Arabia assured everyone that the Qu'ran is sufficient for Muslims and they don't need any other books. In Bloomberg's ranking of the most innovative countries, Islamic countries don't even enter the top 30. Rebuttal - The Library in Baghdad What you forget about the Library of Baghdad is that it was filled with works taken from the School of Nisibis, the School of Edessa, the academy of Jundishapur, the Library of Alexandria, and others. The Umayyad Caliph gathered up many of the Greek works on medicine, alchemy and other disciplines. Christian and Persian dhimmis were used to translate the various works from Greek, Persian, and Syriac into Arabic. Hunayn ibn Ishaq an Assyrian Nestorian Christian physician and scientist, was the most productive translator. You neglect to mention the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil firmly pressed a more literal interpretation of the Qur'an and Hadith and viewed the spread of Greek science as anti-Islamic. Furthermore, the manuscripts were not destroyed in Baghdad but were taken to Maragheh and this doesn't explain the lack of Islamic contribution.