Must admit cant remember if there was a faith bit. Am sure there was something with 'islamic' in the title that suprised me as being part of the museum.
I loved the science museum when I was a boy - it started with the wonderfullly engineered model locomotives etc. But went on from there: I learned about mechanical advantage from the operate-it-yourself pulley, lever, gear etc displays long before we did it it at school. Similarly with the other stuff in the basement.
During the dark ages, the Islamic world was more scientifically and technologically advanced than Europe. They developed some pretty advanced hydraullcally operated machinery, were astronomers, chemists and mathematicians as evidenced by the "al-" words we inherited like the star names Aldebaran, Algol etc, alkali, alcohol in chemistry and algebra in mathematics. They also had the concept of zero as a number.
But while we were emerging from the dark ages and developing science, the Islamic world entered its own dark ages as fundamentalism took over.
This is a common misconception. In fact, Islamic fundamentalism appeared about the same time as Christian fundamentalism, in the mid-19th century, and for much the same reasons: a growing literalism in the reading of the sacred texts, the growth of a technological civilization with its myth of "progress", and the growth of scientism (which is to science what fundamentalism is to religion.)
It wasnt the choice of an islamic display rather than another faith but that everything else was catagorized by section of science or relevance to man such as transport, computing, health matters etc.
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