4.5 The Middle East — Dried Springs

Dried Springs: How the Middle East Bequeathed the Words and Lost the Institutions

Every time a computer executes an operation, it performs an algorithm. The word comes from al-Khwarizmi — a ninth-century Persian mathematician. "Algebra" comes from al-Jabr. "Arabic numerals" still carry the memory of a transmission. Words survive. Institutions die.

The House of Wisdom in Baghdad was destroyed in 1258. But in the nineteenth century, the Nahda — the Arab Renaissance — tried to make the springs flow again. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi translated two thousand European works into Arabic. Muhammad Abduh reformed al-Azhar. The Bulaq Press disseminated scientific knowledge.

Then colonialism, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the fragmentation of the Arab world interrupted the momentum. Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah was born in Lebanon in 1895. A genius of electrical engineering, he filed more than seventy patents — for General Electric, in the United States, where he had to emigrate. He designed solar turbines, photoelectric cells, and power transmission systems. He died at thirty-nine in a car accident. In Lebanon, a statue was erected. The patents remained American.

In Egypt, Muhammad Ali had built engineering and medical schools, sent students to Europe. The country had the world's fifth-largest cotton industry. Then debt, the Suez Canal, and British occupation ended the modernizing momentum.

The Middle East gave the world the fundamental concepts of calculation. And was prevented from continuing what it had begun.

The words remain. The springs await their chance to flow again.