Flying Machine by Abbas ibn Firnas

While some Muslims may be associated with negative developments, Islam has history of great inventors, scientists, philosophers, astronomers and other great men and women who influenced the cause of history. It was the period of Islamic Golden Age of Science and Technology over a thousand year ago.

Some early inventions towards discovery of aircraft, surgery, calculation, university education, toothbrush among others were influenced by Muslim scholars and scientists. This forms part of knowledge sharing from an email I received from a friend.

The report which was first published on CNN.com, provides insight into golden age of Islamic civilisation at the period of Dark Ages of western civilisation.

The report was compiled by Professor Salim Al-Hassani Salim T S Al-Hassani an Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester. He is Chairman of the Foundation of Science, Technology and Civilization (FSTC), founder of the academic portal www.MuslimHeritage.com.

Enjoy the Al-Hassani’s Top 10 Outstanding Muslim Inventions

Yushau A. Shuaib
Excerpt from Al-Hassani’s top 10 outstanding Muslim inventions:
1. Surgery
Around the year 1,000, the celebrated doctor Al Zahrawi published a 1,500 page illustrated encyclopedia of surgery that was used in Europe as a medical reference for the next 500 years. Among his many inventions, Zahrawi discovered the use of dissolving cat gut to stitch wounds — beforehand a second surgery had to be performed to remove sutures. He also reportedly performed the first caesarean operation and created the first pair of forceps.

2. Coffee
Now the Western world’s drink du jour, coffee was first brewed in Yemen around the 9th century. In its earliest days, coffee helped Sufis stay up during late nights of devotion. Later brought to Cairo by a group of students, the coffee buzz soon caught on around the empire. By the 13th century it reached Turkey, but not until the 16th century did the beans start boiling in Europe, brought to Italy by a Venetian trader.

3. Flying machine
“Abbas ibn Firnas was the first person to make a real attempt to construct a flying machine and fly,” said Hassani. In the 9th century he designed a winged apparatus, roughly resembling a bird costume. In his most famous trial near Cordoba in Spain, Firnas flew upward for a few moments, before falling to the ground and partially breaking his back. His designs would undoubtedly have been an inspiration for famed Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci’s hundreds of years later, said Hassani.

4. University
In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi founded the first degree-granting university in Fez, Morocco. Her sister Miriam founded an adjacent mosque and together the complex became the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University. Still operating almost 1,200 years later, Hassani says he hopes the center will remind people that learning is at the core of the Islamic tradition and that the story of the al-Firhi sisters will inspire young Muslim women around the world today.

5. Algebra
The word algebra comes from the title of a Persian mathematician’s famous 9th century treatise “Kitab al-Jabr Wa l-Mugabala” which translates roughly as “The Book of Reasoning and Balancing.” Built on the roots of Greek and Hindu systems, the new algebraic order was a unifying system for rational numbers, irrational numbers and geometrical magnitudes. The same mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, was also the first to introduce the concept of raising a number to a power.

Al-Qarawiyyin University, First Islamic University

6. Optics
“Many of the most important advances in the study of optics come from the Muslim world,” says Hassani. Around the year 1000 Ibn al-Haitham proved that humans see objects by light reflecting off of them and entering the eye, dismissing Euclid and Ptolemy’s theories that light was emitted from the eye itself. This great Muslim physicist also discovered the camera obscura phenomenon, which explains how the eye sees images upright due to the connection between the optic nerve and the brain.

7. Music
Muslim musicians have had a profound impact on Europe, dating back to Charlemagne tried to compete with the music of Baghdad and Cordoba, according to Hassani. Among many instruments that arrived in Europe through the Middle East are the lute and the rahab, an ancestor of the violin. Modern musical scales are also said to derive from the Arabic alphabet.

8. Toothbrush
According to Hassani, the Prophet Mohammed popularized the use of the first toothbrush in around 600. Using a twig from the Meswak tree, he cleaned his teeth and freshened his breath. Substances similar to Meswak are used in modern toothpaste.

9. The crank
Many of the basics of modern automatics were first put to use in the Muslim world, including the revolutionary crank-connecting rod system. By converting rotary motion to linear motion, the crank enables the lifting of heavy objects with relative ease. This technology, discovered by Al-Jazari in the 12th century, exploded across the globe, leading to everything from the bicycle to the internal combustion engine.

10. Hospitals
“Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt,” explained Hassani. The first such medical center was the Ahmad ibn Tulun Hospital, founded in 872 in Cairo. Tulun hospital provided free care for anyone who needed it — a policy based on the Muslim tradition of caring for all who are sick. From Cairo, such hospitals spread around the Muslim world.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/01/29/muslim.inventions/

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ASUU Strike and Nigeria Students

Open Letter to ASUU: Have Pity on Poor Students
By Yushau A. Shuaib

This missive is to appeal to members of Academic Staffs Union of Universities (ASUU), individually and collectively to consider the plight of innocent students and their helpless parents and return to work.

Since July 2nd, 2013 when they declared a “total and indefinite strike” over issues they claim have remained unresolved pertaining to 2009 agreement, innocent students and their poor parents have been at the receiving end of the stalemate.

While some government officials are lousy and combatant in their approach to resolving the faceoff over the strike, it is difficult to fault their arguments and the statistics they reel out over the level of government’s intervention and implementation of the contentious 2009 agreement.

It is therefore a welcome development the recent disbursement of N100 billion by the government for the implementation of the first phase projects listed in the Needs Assessment Report of Universities and another N30 billion to support Federal university Councils in the payment of arrears of Earned Allowances to deserving staff.

As I wrote in an article on the problems of public and private universities in Nigeria in October 2011, the deregulation of education in Nigeria is a deliberate effort to break government’s monopoly on education and by allowing the establishment of private universities to check the incessant strikes by lecturers in public institutions.

I then pointed out that that most of the current leaders attended public universities that were well-funded. Our leaders, including some of the current activist-lecturers enjoyed scholarships and crisis-free academic sessions which unfortunately, the current students could not enjoy.

While we accuse political leaders of selfishness, there is no difference between them with some of the lecturers in their seeming connivance in the promotion of private universities and patronage of foreign institutions, to the expense of our public universities.

It is regrettable that while attempting to register their grievances against inadequate funding from the government, ASUU members take some actions that are inimical to the progress and development of their poor students. Yet, the flexibility of academic environment with job security and huge severance packages influence the decision of many lecturers to remain on the payroll of public universities. We are also aware that some of the lecturers provide part-time lecturing to the private universities in the name of private practice (PP), while others would rather lobby or take political appointments and consultancy jobs than attend to the needs of their students. Surprisingly too, some professors are yet to adapt to the new use of information technology. They still rely on old books and theories of past centuries when the internet provides the theory of reality and practicability.

We must also blame ASUU for indiscipline and lack of adequate inspection on the campuses which have caused cultism, drug addiction, gang rape and other criminalities on campuses. For instance, the incessant ASUU strikes influence idle students to engage in prostitution, robbery and kidnapping to earn a living and to occupy their times. It is therefore not surprising that some of the institutions are alleged to churn out certificated illiterates who can barely write their names and place of origin.

Not every parent can afford or willing to send their children to expensive private universities that widen the social gap between the rich and the poor. The private institutions, too have their weaknesses with some of them operating medieval laws that weaken independence and freedom of expression on the campuses. Like regimented garrisons where all forms of feudal measures are taken, the private institutions do not treat their students as adults but pupils in boarding schools who must observe strict wake-up time and bedtime light-out.

The option of missionary universities also have some challenges. Instead of making the fees affordable, some of them develop unwritten house-rules that ‘no student will ever fail to graduate because of spiritual interventions.’ Apart from discriminatory policies against those that do not believe or practice their faiths, some of them conduct virginity tests on students upon resumption. While worshippers, occasionally act as part time lecturers, whose allowances could be paid ‘only in heaven,’ some of the recruited scholars are actually lecturers from established public universities within their vicinities.

We know that we have crises in our hands and it seems the government with recent moves have demonstrated willingness to resolve the crisis. After a recent meeting of key government officials with Vice-Chancellors and Chairmen of Councils of Public Universities, it was disclosed that the government had implemented some of the agreements it entered with the academic staff. These include implementations of the Consolidated Salary Structure for Academics and non-teaching staff; National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) for staff of universities; Amendment of Pensionable Retirement Age of Academics in the Professorial cadre as Professors and Readers now retire at 70 years while others now retire at 65 instead of 60 years.

Government has also provided a counterpart funding of N250 million to help ASUU meet up with the mandatory deposit required for registration of Nigerian Universities Pension Management Company (NUPEMCO) while it continues to assist state universities through the Federal intervention agencies.

There should be a way to resolve demands pertaining to commercial ventures, especially the alleged request by ASUU for the transfer of government landed properties to universities, which government resists because ASUU has no structure to manage or maintain such property.

While we must call on our policy makers to ensure that our universities are adequately funded, our lawmakers should enact laws that would compel lecturers to be responsible to their duties and concentrate on the job for which they are discriminatorily remunerated. The law should also compel public officers to send their children to public institutions where they can relate and compete with other poor students.

Regulatory bodies such as NUC, JAMB, NECO and WAEC should be more proactive and responsive in monitoring responsibilities so as to ensure that Nigerian universities comply with international best practices.

This article by Yushau A. Shuaib has been published in September 2013 in the print editions of the Economic Confidential, People’s Daily, Daily Sun, Thisday, Daily Trust, Nigerian Tribune, Vanguard, National Mirror and Blueprint.

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Cultism exists in few universities in Nigeria

The major aim of establishing tertiary institutions is to build high-level manpower for national development. It is a place where people acquire the needed tools; social, mental and intellectual skills, which will be required by the beneficiary to become self-reliant and resourceful member of the society.

In Nigeria today, there are public universities owned and funded by the governments, on the other hand are the private universities, owned by individuals, business enterprises and religious bodies. Statistics show that as at October 2011, there are 36 federal universities, 37 state universities and 45 privately owned universities.

The deregulation of education in Nigeria is a deliberate effort to break government’s monopoly on education, thereby giving freedom to private participation in the provision and management of education in order to check the incessant strikes by lecturers in public universities improve the quality of education and return the lost glory in the nation’s university system. These factors largely influenced the decision of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar’s administration to endorse and approve private universities of which they are also beneficiaries of the licences.

Ironically, most Nigerian leaders benefited from the public universities when they were well-funded with scholarship, free meals, free accommodation, stipends and high quality facilities for learning. Unfortunately these same beneficiaries could not maintain the standard which they enjoyed as students of public universities; instead they have allowed it to go into near total demise.

While one could observe the selfishness of some of our leaders and their seeming connivance in promoting private universities to the expense of the public institutions, yet the so-called leaders would rather sponsor their children to study in foreign universities rather than allow them attend any of the private or public higher institutions in Nigeria.

There are clear justifications for the establishment of private universities, these include increase access to education due to acute shortage of places in the existing institutions, overcrowded and deplorable physical facilities. The lecturers in public universities under the auspices of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) could also be blamed for the bastardization in that system. Members of the union, in their efforts to register their grievances against inadequate funding from the government take some actions that are inimical to the progress and development of their poor students.

In fact the flexibility of academic environment with job security and huge severance packages influence lecturers to retain their offices in public universities while providing part-time lecturing to the private universities in the name of private practice (PP). Some of them would rather lobby or take political appointments and consultancy jobs than attend to the needs of their students. Surprisingly too, some professor are yet to adapt to the new information technology. They still rely on old books and theories of past centuries when the internet provides the theory of reality and practicability. Only in Nigeria University one could find a lecturer that does not have an email.

Indiscipline and lack of adequate inspection and close monitoring on the campuses by relevant authorities have caused some students at the public universities to engage in cultism, drug addiction, gang rape and other criminalities. The situation becomes worrisome whenever there are strikes, where some idle students engage in prostitution, robbery and kidnapping to earn a living and to occupy their times. At the end, these institutions churn out certificated illiterates who could barely write their names and place of origin, not to mention the application and demonstration of their expectedly acquired knowledge.

The federal character principle that permits universities the right to give priority attention to the catchment areas in admission of students and recruitment of staff also has its negative effect on the university system. This results in situation where dunderheads are admitted and unqualified workforce recruited. The outcome of such policies is clear for everyone to see.

Private universities as profit-making ventures, apart from being expensive have also widened the social gap between the rich and the poor as a new status symbol. Proprietors are not required to understand the knitty gritty of managing an academic environment but can give directives to recruited administrators. Requirements for admission into private universities are not stringent as under-aged applicants and failed candidates in national common entrance examinations could easily get admissions once they could afford to pay the exorbitant fees into private universities. There is also an arbitrary inflation of tuition fees annually. There are also medieval laws put in place by some schools to weaken independence and freedom of expression on the campuses.  Like regimented garrisons where all forms of feudal measures are taken, the universities do not treat their students as adult and matured persons but like boarding schools’ boys and girls. For instance, one of these universities is reported to have strict wake-up time and bedtime light-out to be observed by the students.  In another instance, a university is reported to conduct virginity tests on students upon resumption.

The missionary universities established by religious organisations have some tactics to woo prospective students for enrolments. Some have unwritten house-rules that ‘no student will ever fail to graduate because of spiritual interventions.’ They also have discriminatory policies against those that do not believe or practice their faiths. Apart from employing the service of some of their worshippers as part time lecturers, whose allowances could be paid ‘only in heaven’, most of the other recruited scholars are actually lecturers from established public universities within their vicinities. Since well-qualified tutors would rather take offer in public universities because of the flexibility I mentioned early, the less qualified and jobless candidates are mostly in private universities where they are reengineered to work tediously to bring out the best in their students.

The establishment of private universities could be a blessing to Nigeria’s education system but not an alternative way of funding the public ones, because there are huge federal budgets and various revenues generated in the name of taxes for education available to government institutions of learning. Therefore government has no excuse not to adequately fund the universities.

The private universities should remain private for the very rich who could afford them but without government’s financial interventions, since they are established for maximization of profit on investment. They could utilise other avenues of revenue generation through charity organisations as well as private entities that are willing to provide endowments and sponsorships as parts of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes.

Policy makers and lawmakers should ensure that our universities are adequately funded and make laws that would compel lecturers to be responsible to their duties and restrict them from Private Practices once there are improvements in their salaries. Top public office holders should be compelled to send their qualified children to public institutions of learning so that the poor would have confidence in getting the best training out of it.

Regulatory bodies such as the Nigeria University Commission (NUC), Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), National Examination Council (NECO) and West African Examination Council (WAEC) should be more proactive and responsive in their close monitoring to ensure that Nigerian universities both public and private comply with international best practices with quality standard in term of examination supervision, enrolment, and accreditation of courses.  Well qualified staff; administrators and lecturers should be employed to meet the needs of their students.

This article by Yushau A. Shuaib has been published in October 2011 in Economic Confidential, People Daily, Nigerian Tribune, Daily Trust, Leadership, Blueprint, Champion, Vanguard, National Mirror and New Nigerian Newspapers

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