inventions: The Islamic World 581 The first carriages started to be used from the 1370s, possibly earlier Rocking carriages originated in what is today Hungary; the body of the carriage was suspended by leather straps from the frame, a design that helped smooth out bumpy rides By the 15th century they were common in western Europe The numerous technological developments that occurred over the course of the Middle Ages were primarily the work of unknown inventors People were only just starting to focus on contemporary inventions as something of interest in their own right This lack of interest in the subject of invention means that the identities of very few medieval inventors are known The Islamic World by Kirk H Beetz In the medieval Islamic world there was a tremendous desire to learn about the world Learning about nature and how it worked seemed to many people to be a godly pursuit, because it involved understanding God’s creation In the process of making discoveries about nature, Muslims learned how aspects of the physical world worked, and out of this knowledge came new ways for keeping time, new methods to move water efficiently, and perhaps new sciences, such as pharmacology and agriculture Medieval Muslims would not have used the term science, which they reserved only for the study of religion and religion’s application to living; nevertheless, Muslims developed what modern people would call natural science From the 10th century to the 12th century Islamic inventing flourished: Numerous mathematicians, astronomers, and chemists hit upon fresh ways of thinking about and seeing the world In the Islamic world there was always conflict between those who wished to invent and those who resisted change to their way of life This conflict manifested itself in two major ways One manifestation was in a division between theologians and philosophers In general, the philosophers viewed the secular world as existing apart from the religious world They believed that the Koran applied only to spirituality and that the Hadith (comprising accounts of Muhammad’s life and sayings) was too fragmentary to supply guidance to research into the natural world They were opposed by theologians, who insisted that all of life was religious and that the study of the natural world and the study of God were the same thing, indivisible The other division had become a powerful social force by the 12th century and came to dominate much of Islamic teaching This division involved the belief that just as the Koran was the final revealed word of God, given to God’s last prophet, Muhammad, and just as Arabic was the one language in which to read and understand God’s word, so too the world in which the word was revealed was the only proper world in which to live In sum, this point of view held that nothing not existing in the age of Muhammad—that is, the seventh century—should exist in the world thereafter These views—that there was no secular world, only a religious one, and that the seventh century represented the ideal level of human advancement—had real-world consequences Great observatories were torn down because clerics declared them to be too secular Financial support by governments and private donors was often withheld from inventors, and some scientists and inventors had to travel from place to place to find sites where they could their research and even teach in schools It is because of the general, but not complete, curbing of invention in the Islamic world after the 12th century that some historians refer to the period from 900 to 1200 as a golden age for Islamic science and invention, and historians also use it to account for why the civilization of the Islamic world outshone many other cultures in scholarship and invention in the 12th century but eventually fell behind Christian Europe in technology and scientific research There were also divergent views on medicine, creating a long-term tension within Islamic medical circles One view was tibb nabawi, meaning “prophetic medicine.” This philosophy developed as a reaction against ancient Greek learning, which in translation had spurred much growth in medical practices in the Islamic world Tibb nabawi looked to what the Hadith said about how Muhammad and those close to him dealt with health and medical issues In general, it disregarded what the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese had to say about medicine The majority of Islamic physicians followed another point of view—that they as medical professionals were searching for truth and that it did not matter where the truth came from These physicians were notable for their keen observation of symptoms One such physician, Ibn alKhatib (ca 1313–74), through empirical observation, learned how contagious diseases spread, especially plague His work may have led to the invention of inoculating people against diseases, which peoples of the Near East seem to have been doing before Europeans took up the practice Although the Islamic world may have lagged behind the Far East in surgical practices, its inventors created numerous surgical instruments, including types of saws and scalpels that are similar to instruments of modern surgeons In other ways, physicians of the Islamic world may have been unsurpassed in the medieval era because they invented a way of thinking about treatment of patients, based on observation Rather than relying on tradition, even the tradition of the ancient Greeks, they observed and noted how medicines affected