Wikipedia entries can be amazingly accurate, and even more amazingly inaccurate. Content is not monitored; the hope is that users will police one another to arrive at the truth, correcting errors, adding details. But what if the contributors are not interested in the truth? For example, there is a sustained effort by one Wikipedia editor to seed the site with false claims about inventions first built by Muslims. More on this editor, and the lies he has been disseminating at Wikipedia, can be found here: “The Invention of Islamic Invention,” Cremieux, September 30, 2026:
Growing up, it was a common trope that cultures that we now associate with poverty, violence, and oppression were once world-leading in promoting prosperity and moral progress as well as the quintessentially human act of inventing. This popular belief was ultimately not driven by an earnest desire to promote awareness of empirically true but neglected facts. Instead, it was supported by anecdotes and quotations of dubious reliability and relevance, by scholarship that has turned out to be exaggerated or fraudulent, and by the promotion of these things in popular media.
My favorite example of this has to do with the invention of many of the inventions credited to the so-called Islamic Golden Age by a rogue Wikipedia editor.
Have you ever heard the name “Jagged_85”? If you’re a history buff, you’ve probably at least heard of some of his claims. For example:
- Muslims invented funnels and sieves
- Al-Razi invented dissolving substances and sublimation
- Jabir ibn Hayyan invented cheese glue
- Ibn Sahl first described the parabolic mirror
- An Islamic water clock from the 12th century had the earliest copper pipes
- Avicenna formulated momentum as weight times velocity
- The Brethren of Purity proposed a heliocentric universe in the 10th century
- Darwin drew on Ibn Miskawayh’s work to develop the theory of evolution
- Al-Ghazali directly influenced Descartes’ later philosophical work
There are many other claims I could add to this list: Taqi al-Din invented the telescope sometime in the 1570s; Avicenna discovered microorganisms; Muhammad ibn Musa discovered gravity between planets; Al-Biruni discovered elliptical planetary orbits; Al-Jazari invented flow regulators and feedback control; Raqqa had a major glass factory where 300 different glass recipes were used, or—most amazingly—Al-Battani discovered relativity a millennium before Einstein.
Jagged_85 vandalized thousands of articles while making over 87,000 Wikipedia edits in the time between starting in 2005 and being caught in 2012. Those edits have led to hundreds of false claims misattributed to history books and papers, and now, those claims are alive on the internet, being repeated carelessly and promoted as if they’re true, when they are anything but. Several of these claims have even seeped into the scholarly literature, and now they’ve gained some credence as true facts by virtue of being repeated by scholars misled by what they read in Jagged_85’s Wikipedia articles!
Muslims who allow themselves to believe this nonsense of course welcome all those Wikipedia entries about the scientific achievements of Muslims that never were. After all, they are, as the Qur’an says, the “best of peoples.” It contributes to their amour-propre, their sense of their own wonderfulness. The real story is that almost all the advances in science came not from the Muslim world but from the West and, to a lesser extent, China (see Joseph Needham’s magnum opus Science and Civilisation in China). Muslims are discouraged from the habit of skepticism which might lead them to question parts of their faith, and that would never do. But skepticism is central to the enterprise of science, to question, to test, to accept nothing on faith. For Muslims, it is considered a great achievement to learn by heart all of the Qur’an, a feat which most Westerners would consider a waste of time and memory.
Jagged_85 alone has made 87,000 edits at Wikipedia. So should you be so inclined, please enter the Wikipedia thickets to locate those entries that have to do with claims of Muslim inventiveness. Check for signs that a certain Jagged_85 has contributed his meretricious mite to the entry, and remove his lies and replace them with the truth.
Per aspera ad astra.
Kosh's Shadow says
“Arabic” numerals were invented by the Hindus and brought West by Arab merchants.
Wellington says
Highly instructive how apologists for Islam have to make things up, which of course includes the appropriation of the achievements of others. Put another way, Islam is a thief.
James Lincoln says
Wikipedia is useful for nonpolitical stuff like an overview of the 1986 Masters golf tournament or the specs on a 1965 GTO.
Anything political, it leans left – sometimes pretty hard.
Readers beware…
John Pepple says
Despite all the claims that have been made about inventions by other cultures, the fact is that radio was not invented till we in the West invented it. No one else came close.
Slightly off the topic, but if radio was invented by just one culture, and since there was no guarantee that such a culture would emerge, then there is no guarantee that any intelligent species anywhere else in the universe would inevitably develop radio. I am constantly trying to get SETI people to understand this, and they just don’t want to think about it. For them, an intelligent species will of course develop radio and spaceships and eventually Dyson spheres. Sheesh.