Islamic Civilization

The Industrial Legacy

 In this outline, mainly due to space considerations, many industries, which could have been seen under different headings, are grouped together under one heading. These include primarily those grouped under earthenware and chemical industries.

Textile industries

 Documented evidence of 916 at the monastery of San Vincente of Ovideo shows a considerable amount of Arabic expressions describing textile products and items of clothing.[1] These coincide exactly with the introduction of cotton manufacture for the first time into Europe by the Muslims in both Sicily , but most of all in Spain under Abd Errahman III (912-961). He, Abd Errahman, also established extensive manufactures of silk and leather.[2] Scott emphasises most particularly the strength and delicacy of texture of the products, and the extraordinary permanence of the dyes employed in the fabrics.[3]Le Bon is categorical that it is from Islamic Sicily that the art of cloth dyeing spread to Europe.[4]Sicily seems to have shared the same expertise as is often the case with most manifestations of Islamic civilisation . On the island, the textile factories of Palermo, which had fame under the Muslims carried on under the Normans, of which remnants survive in the regalia of Roger II, preserved in the Treasury of the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna.[5] In the middle of the 12^th century, silk industry seems still restricted to Sicily alone, and from there it spread to other regions in the course of the 13^th century.[6] It spread to central and northern Italy, Provence  and finally to northern Germany.[7]Lucca became the great centre of the silk trade but Bologna, Venice , Augsburg, Ulm and other cities also raised silk worm or produced silk fabrics.[8]

  Carpet manufacturing played a major part in furthering Islamic crafts and skills, and also in sharpening Western tastes. It was Eleanor of Castile who brought woven carpets to England  in 1255 on her marriage to the future Edward I.[9] Gradually the once muddy and straw covered floors left way to carpets as we have today. The Islamic impact stretched further in geographical terms, to the far north, one of the oldest extant Oriental carpets, dating from the early 15^th century, was found in the village church of Marby in northern Sweden, and there is a whole category of Scandinavian adaptations of Oriental textiles, some of them of Islamic derivations.[10]

From the East, Islamic textile products introduced, not just linguistic expressions, but also new varieties of cloth and ideas, such as Damask (from Damascus ), Fustian from Fustat and Muslin (from Mosul) in which the respective types of textiles were believed to be manufactured.[11] Further legacy in the field, that associates names and objects, includes cotton, divan, sofa, and mattress, as well as baldachin.[12]

 In respect to technological breakthroughs within the industry, Pacey notes that, along with paper, the magnetic compass, and other innovations, a new type of loom was one of the innovations which appeared in Western Europe soon after 1150.[13] Such textile technology was already in existence in Muslim Spain centuries before appearing in the rest of Western Christendom . The early phase lasting from 825 to 925 was marked by two interesting technological innovations, one of them being the horizontal loom, which appeared, together with the use, well in advance of Christian Europe, of silk thread,[14] as in the shroud of Ona, Burgos (datable to sometime around 925.)[15] The implications are clear: the horizontal loom was already in use in Al-Andalus at least three centuries before the rest of Europe, giving rise to a weaving industry there.[16]

Thanks to Pacey’s erudition, it is possible to outline the history of impact in this area, and accept with him, that although, in the use of non human energy, Europe in 1150 was the equal of the Islamic and Chinese  civilisation, in terms of the sophistication of individual machines, however, notably for textile processing, and in terms of the broad scope of its technology, Europe was still a backward region, which stood to benefit much from its contacts with Islam.[17] A few years before 1150, the first cotton cloth to be woven in West Africa was produced, development indicating that new areas were being drawn into technological dialogue due to events in Spain and nearby areas of Africa.[18] Migration of people with relevant skills was a possible explanation for the different diffusion of many techniques.[19] Documentation of the equipment used is non existent, but deductions can be made from a distribution map of different types of loom in Africa prepared by a specialist on ethnic textile traditions.[20] If we take only the looms used for weaving cotton, and exclude types thought to derive from later European influence, the distribution coincides almost exactly with the areas, which were under Islamic influence by 1150 or soon after; and the vertical cotton loom used in the Mali region of West Africa, and operated only by women, was of a type also found in North Africa.[21] It is possible that looms of this type were in use as early as 1150, and that they were introduced into Mali about then as a result of trade with North Africa.[22]In Europe, a new type of horizontal loom was introduced, notably in the Low Countries for weaving woollens, and its great advantage over earlier European looms was that some operations (such as raising and lowering heddles) could now be controlled by foot pedals, thus leaving the weaver’s hands free to pass the shuttle forward and backward; the idea of pedal operation possibly derived from Islamic weaving.[23] However, whilst in Iran, Syria , and parts of East of Africa, when pedals were used, the operator sat with his feet in a pit below a fairly low slung loom, in the West, the whole mechanism was raised higher above the ground on a more substantial frame, precisely like looms of this type, which were very widely used in the Islamic part of Spain by 1177, and it was probably from here that they were first adopted in Christian Europe.[24]