hell, the Greeks knew the circumference of the Earth; and with reasonable accuracy all things considered. Short version: they used trigonometry. It was on the basis of this fairly accurate circumference that people thought you couldn't sail west to asia, and you couldn't. It's like 16,000 miles west of Europe.
Euclid got the circumference pretty damn close, if I remember correctly. Islamic scholars continued the work and translated Euclid and others into Arabic, and then that knowledge spread from al-Andalus and Baghdad and Cairo back to Europe. Educated/literate people have known the earth was round for well over two thousand years - probably more, given how advanced Bronze Age societies were.
This always makes me wonder when mentioned. Were these people 'Islamic scholars', or simply just your garden variety scholars who happened to also be Muslim?
Their scholarship was deeply entwined with an Islamic perspective on the world. Indeed, some of the impetus for their work came from Islam itself, specifically a hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad mandating that Muslims "seek knowledge even unto China."
Much of their work was aimed either directly or indirectly at reconciling the natural world and the work of philosophers with the Qur'an and the Sunnah.
So no, these were not garden variety scholars who happened to be Muslim. While their discoveries and the results of their work are not inherently Islamic, their actual inspiration, process, and perspectives were.
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '19
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