Ahmed Mohamed is an American teen who made headlines for his indefensible arrest at his public school in Irving, Texas, for the egregious crime of having brought a clock he made to school.
His real mistake, of course, was trusting in a teacher and school administrators to act like educators instead of bigots. That trust was misplaced; the teacher and school officials interpreted Mohamed’s work as something terroristic and dangerous, instead of what it was: A creation by a boy who was, even at the time of his being taken away in handcuffs, wearing a NASA t-shirt proclaiming his obvious interest in all things tech-sci.
Interestingly enough, despite this alleged concern that Mohamed was holding something dangerous, the school was not alerted, placed on lockdown, or otherwise made safe against a potential bomb blast. Mohamed himself was arrested in the school office, with no one apparently very concerned that a bomb might go off at any time. Charges have been dropped.
Mohamed later noted in a news conference that he does have an invention of his own, one that he doesn’t want to describe in too much detail because he wants “to patent it” first. This Muslim boy who now has been invited to the White House has plans that fit exquisitely into a lengthy and layered, if bumpy and uneven, Muslim tradition of contributing to positive advances in science and technology.
Had his teacher any awareness of the longstanding commitment in the Muslim culture to beneficial contributions to science and technology--including clocks--instead of an apparent reflexive bigotry related to Mohamed’s name and religion, this educator might have seen Mohamed’s work in a more appropriate context.
The remarkable scientific and technological contributions of Muslim culture date back more than a thousand years. For example, in the year 1000, a Muslim doctor from Cordoba, Spain, published a 1500-page encyclopedia of surgery called Al-Tasrif li-man 'ajaza 'an al-ta'lif, complete with colored illustrations. This fellow, Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn Abbas Al-Zahrawi (known in Latin as Albucasis), is credited for having performed the first cesarean section and for writing the first known description of hemophilia as a disease passed from unaffected mothers to their sons.
Two hundred years before Al-Zahrawi developed his encyclopedia, a mathematician in Baghdad named Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote a famous algebra book, al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa’l-muqābala. His work pulled together elements from the Greek (including, literally, Euclid’s Elements) to develop a systematic approach to resolving quadratic equations.
A few centuries later, the Arabic number system and way of styling numerals began to seep into Western consciousness, and we use them to this day. Even the word “algebra” itself is taken from Arabic Al-Jabr (~restoration).
Perhaps one of the most famous scientists and philosophers from the Islamic tradition was Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna. He was a physician who wrote medical textbooks, cured a king of ‘severe colic’, and showed a sophisticated (for his time) understanding of how diseases pass from person to person. His philosophy writings influenced Thomas Aquinas. He made contributions to astronomy and physics, including the prediction that light must involve something particulate and that its speed cannot be infinite.
On top of all of that, he made some significant contributions to musical understanding and sensory perception and had an intuitively correct opinion about the foundations of chemistry that contrasted directly with widely held beliefs of his time.
Ahead of and in parallel to all of the early developments and advances in the European world that Western students have learned about for decades, the Muslim world was meticulously and intensely engaged in scientific, mathematical, and philosophical investigations and discoveries. The scholars who contributed to this rich and brilliant body of work—including one wealthy Muslim woman, Fatima Al-Fihri, who founded the world’s oldest university—are so numerous and their contributions so immense that they form a distinct canon of scientific scholarship that deserves the same celebration and recognition, even as the Muslim world has struggled with multiple social factors in the last century that have stifled progress.
Among the technologies that emerged from all of this earlier scholarship in the Muslim world is a series of remarkable clocks, one a machine that a 12th-century Muslim mechanical engineer named Al-Jazari built. Al-Jazari is famed as a scholar, in particular for his engineering book, Al-Jami `bayn al-`ilm wa 'l-`amal al-nafi `fi sina `at al-hiyal (A Compendium on the Theory and Useful Practice of the Mechanical Arts). Al-Jazari’s most famous clock is his Castle Clock, a behemoth of a timepiece that relied on water and many richly colored moving parts to keep time throughout the day.
When a boy with a scientific bent shows originality and motivation, when he takes things apart and rebuilds them or develops contraptions of his own, in the western world, many people would draw an immediate comparison between that boy and, say, Thomas Edison or Nicola Tesla.
But when a boy with a certain kind of name—like Ahmed Mohamed—shows up at his school with something he built himself, a clock, no less, his teacher didn’t look at him with pride and think, “Another Al-Jazari. That’s wonderful.” No. That teacher gets the cops involved, instead.
Last updated September 18.
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