CNN last Wednesday ran a viciously mendacious “article” dragging out the “Muslim inventions” myth – yet again.
This is hardly new; I wrote of it in 2012. CNN is pushing a new book that is based on 1001 Muslim Inventions, a traveling museum exhibit that has appeared all over the West to huge acclaim from the likes of Prince Charles. It has indoctrinated hundreds of thousands of children into a rosy and romanticized view of Islam that makes them less appreciative of their own culture’s achievements and more complacent about Islamization in the West.
And now we see historical revisionism take on a new life, as history is scrubbed and manufactured Muslim myths are presented as fact. “1001 Muslim Inventions” is almost unfailingly dishonest. It touts surgery as one of the top 10 Muslim inventions, but in reality, surgery began in the Neolithic era and was widely practiced in ancient Greece. Likewise, the coffee plant was discovered in Christian Ethiopia.
Next on CNN’s list is flight: “Abbas ibn Firnas was the first person to make a real attempt to construct a flying machine and fly.” Abbas ibn Firnas was a man who threw on a pair of manmade wings and attempted to fly, but only ended up breaking his back. That makes him the father of the flying machine?
Fourth in CNN’s top ten Muslim inventions is the university: “In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi founded the first degree-granting university in Fez, Morocco.” The first university? Tell it to the Jews, a people 6,000 years old, with education as the cornerstone of their culture. And Nalanda University of India dates back to the fifth century.
Then comes algebra, and this claim, as well as the others, is utter nonsense. A Muslim, Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa, is often described as the originator of algebra. But Abu Ja’far lived between 780 and 850 AD; algebra initiated in ancient Babylon, Egypt, and Athens, 2,500 years before Abu Ja’far was born.
Next is optics, which also began long before Islam, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, where lenses were developed by artisans working from theories the Greek philosophers.
CNN even has the audacity to claim music as a Muslim invention, despite the fact that Islamic law forbids music. Are they kidding? Where are the Muslim Bachs, Beethovens, and Gershwins? What about Jewish music, which goes back over 5,000 years? Muhammad wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s eye.
CNN also claims the toothbrush for Islam, saying that Muhammad, whom they refer to, of course, as “the prophet,” “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.”
Muhammad was the first man to use an object to clean his teeth? Color me laughing. In reality, the bristle toothbrush wasn’t invented until 1498, in China. And the crank, the next item on CNN’s list (which was compiled by a crank indeed), dates back to Spain in the fifth century BC. The hospital, the last item on CNN’s list, goes back to ancient Rome.
With the advent of now daily jihad terror plots, arrests, and attacks, the Islamic/leftist machine is in fifth gear. Teen Vogue, the BBC, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, Newsweek and all the mainstream media outlets are churning out lies, myths and Islamic supremacist narratives to counter reality. Damn the truth, full speed ahead.
It’s endless, this sharia scrubbing of history. It’s why our children are not taught true Islamic history in the public schools: the jihadi wars, cultural annihilations, and enslavements or why the hundreds of millions of victims of Islamic wars have disappeared from world history courses.
Many of the inventions the Muslims take credit for are the inventions of the peoples, countries and lands they conquered. The booty from their conquests wasn’t only tangible gold, women, and monies, but intellectual theft as well.
The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate — not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians. The bottom line: the inventions and discoveries attributed to the Muslim world were actually stolen from conquered peoples.
CNN, by spreading this nonsense, shows itself yet again to be more interested in politically correct fiction than news. “1001 Muslim Inventions” is not history, but propaganda – and par for the course for the mainstream media these days.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.