The superstitious feeling of the Muslim as to the polluted touch of the dead, debarred the orthodox from attempting the study of anatomy. The doctrine that even at death the soul does not depart from the body, and the popular belief that both soul and body must appear entire to undergo the examination by Munkar and Nakīr in the grave, were sufficient reasons why the dissection of the dead body should not be attempted.
Operation for cataract in the eye was an Arabian practice, and the celebrated philosopher, Avicenna (Abū ʿAlī ibn Sīnāʾ) wrote in defence of depression instead of extraction, which he considered a dangerous experiment.
Botany, as subsidiary to medicine, was studied by the Saracens; and it is said the Arabian botanists discovered several herbal remedies, which were not known to the Greeks. Ibn al-Bait̤ār, a native of Malaga, who died at Damascus A.D. 1248, was the most distinguished Arabian botanist. Al-Birūnī, who died A.D. 941, resided in India for nearly forty years in order to study botany and chemistry.
The first great Arabic chemist was Jābir, a native of Ḥarrān in Mesopotamia. He lived in the eighth century, and only some 150 years after the flight of Muḥammad. He is credited with the discovery of sulphuric acid, nitric acid, and aqua regia. D’Herbelot states that he wrote 500 works on chemistry. The nomenclature of science demonstrates how much it owes to the Arabs—alcohol, alembic, alkali, and other similar terms, being derived from the Saracens.
The science of astronomy, insomuch as it was necessary for the study of the occult science of astrology, was cultivated with great zeal. The K͟halīfah Maʾmūn was himself devoted to this study. Under his patronage, the astronomers of Bag͟hdād and al-Kūfah accurately measured a degree of the great circle of the earth, and determined at 24,000 miles the entire circumference of the globe. (See Abū ʾl-Fidāʾ and Ibn K͟hallikān.) The obliquity of the ecliptic was calculated at about twenty-three degrees and a half, “but,” as Andrew Crichton remarks, “not a single step was made towards the discovery of the solar system beyond the hypothesis of Ptolemy.” Modern astronomy is indebted to the Saracens for the introduction of observatories. The celebrated astronomer and mathematician Jābir (A.D. 1196), erected one at Seville, which may still be seen. Bailly, in his Hist. de l’Astronomie, affirms that Kepler drew the ideas that led to his discovery of the elliptical orbits of planets from the Saracen, Nūru ʾd-dīn, whose treatise on the sphere is preserved in the Escurial library.
Algebra, though not the invention of the Arabs, received valuable accessions from their talents, and Ibn Mūsā and Jābir composed original works on spherical trigonometry. Al-Kindī translated Autolycus’ De Sphæra Mota, and wrote a treatise of his own De Sex Quantitatibus.
Architecture was an art in which the Saracens excelled, but their buildings were erected on the wrecks of cities, castles, and fortresses, which they had destroyed, and the Saracenic style is merely a copy of the Byzantine. [[ARCHITECTURE].]
To the early Muslims, pictures and sculpture were considered impious and contrary to divine law, and it is to these strong religious feelings that we owe the introduction of that peculiar style of embellishment which is called the Arabesque, which rejects all representations of human and animal figures.
In calligraphy or ornamental writing, the Muslims excel even to the present day, although it is to the Chinese that they are indebted for the purity and elegance of their paper.
Music is generally understood to have been forbidden in the Muḥammadan religion, but both at Bag͟hdād and Cordova were established schools for the cultivation of this art. [[MUSIC].]