The West's Indebtedness to Islam in the Field of Astronomy

Today, the West claims that it holds the first position in science and research. In fact, except for the four recent centuries, which witnessed scientific achievements in the West, the Islamic civilization had for about a thousand years been a leading cultural center and in that period most of the cities were scientific and educational bases of the world and in that period many Muslim elites and thinkers gained worldwide fame. This research seeks through a descriptive-explanatory analysis to investigate the role of Muslims in discovering the mysteries of creation in astronomy and show how astronomy reached Europe. The findings of research show that Muslim astronomers whose ideas are based on religious doctrines, built fully equipped observatories in Bagdad, Damascus, Maragheh, Samarkand and Istanbul during the 3rd to-10th centuries AH. Contrary to Ptolemaist’s astronomy, they developed new theories, and the things proposed in the 16th and 17th centuries by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, like the law of inertia, the ellipticity of orbits, universal gravitation had in fact been previously proposed by Muslim astronomers, and this westerners’ action is considered as a kind of plagiarism.