Alchemy to Chemistry (Paperback) | Released: 11 Dec 2022

True history shines like a beacon in perilous times. History helps us understand our past so that we can be sure whether we are headed in the right direction. It is a noted fact that diverse cultures that appeared in the world had contributed greatly to the development of science, especially in the field of chemistry. Through this humble work of ours, we attempt to narrate the story of the science of Chemistry as it was developed by Arab nee Muslim scientists from the beginning 8th century until the 13th century CE. Titled, Alchemy to Chemistry: A History of Chemistry through the Middle. Ages. The book describes the great contributions that this science has made toward advancing human civilizations and how it will lead us to a brighter future. This study not only explores the golden age of Arab chemists but also gives an idea of some of the contributions made by ancient civilizations, especially ancient Indian civilization, to chemistry. What George Sarton wrote in his celebrated book, Introduction to the History of Science, (1950) is also worth quoting in this regard: If the West wants to experience the need for deep knowledge, let them turn their attention to the Arabs, not to Greek sources, first. The period in history between the 5th and 15th CE is largely obscured and those 1000 years of blacked-out history are poised to give rich dividends. These centuries designated as the dark ages, however, are the missing centuries of the history of the world. This period is not a void as some might call it derisively. That's far from the truth. Innumerable scholarly works happened. In fact, these long years were the incubation or gestation period for both. It is a pity that a large number of historians have turned a blind eye to this fact. When Europe was shrouded in the relative darkness of the Middle Ages following the demise of the Greco-Roman Civilization, Arab astronomers were observing the heavens from the observatories in Samarkhand, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Marrakesh, and Cordova, where Islamic physicians, philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, geographers, and alchemists were pursuing their researches, preserving and extending the knowledge that they had obtained principally from the ancient Greeks, with some contributions from ancient Mesopotamia, Sasanian Persia, India, and China. It was through these scholars of science and learning that knowledge gained in the Islamic world passed to Europe, beginning as far back as the 6th to 9th centuries. Translations from Arabic to Latin inspired the developments that led to the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, with the theories and discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton becoming the voices of the day. Several modern scholars such as Fielding H. Garrison, Sultan Bashir Mahmood, and Syed Hossein Nasr consider modern science and the scientific method to have been greatly inspired by medieval scientists who introduced a modern empirical, experimental and quantitative approach to scientific inquiry.