The ink of a scholar (Side-effect)

The writer is a poet and author
based in Islamabad.
I got up in the morning with the piercing ring of the alarm clock. I believe this sort of modern clock was invented by Alexander Bain, a Scotsman, in 1840. Now we get better and more efficient electronic wristwatches and timepieces. But Bain improvised the old clocks in an unprecedented way. After squirming in bed for a few moments, I went straight to the kitchen to heat water for my first cup of the day. For drinking purposes and for making coffee and tea, we get water from a purification plant installed by the municipal services authority in the capital – the CDA. It was in the US in 1910 that purification of drinking water began. Then I lit the stove. The one who pioneered the modern kitchen stove was Francois Cuvillies, who lived in France in the eighteenth century. I finished my coffee, and got ready to leave for work.
My cell phone buzzed. A friend wanted me to pick him up on the way to work. But what was the world like before cell phones, particularly before the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876? Many other people had worked before him, and many after, on designing and then improving this remarkable invention. The cell phone was invented in 1973, again in the US by John Mitchell and Dr Martin Cooper.
I left home and drove to my friend’s place in my car. It is a simple car that runs on petrol. There is a bit of a mechanical engineer left in me. So let me tell you that the cars we drive have an internal combustion engine, first developed in France in 1807. Earlier, a mechanical automobile was also built in France in the eighteenth century. I turn the car radio on, and we listen to some crappy songs for a while and then switch to another station for a news bulletin.
Over a century, many people tried to develop radio transmission; finally, it was an Italian man, Guglielmo Marconi, who was able to demonstrate successful radio transmission at the turn of the

twentieth century. We reached our work place. It was somewhat muggy. I turned on the air conditioner in my office. It was Willis Carrier, an American, who started making air conditioners in 1902. Then I went up to my desk and switched on the computer. Ah! The computer – this machine dominates our lives and livelihoods.
From writing to checking weather, from getting flights booked to browsing the Internet for news and information, for entertainment and education, for receiving and sending messages from family, friends, colleagues and people at large, we are dependent on a computer. Those who invented this overwhelming electronic digital machine were the Americans and the British between 1940 and 1945.
After about an hour of reaching my office, the power supply goes off. This is the usual load shedding that happens intermittently during the day. In a couple of seconds, the generator installed in our work premises starts automatically with a gruelling sound. The sound insulation works to an extent. But there could be no work without electricity. Earth was a different planet before electric power, electric motor and electric supply on a mass scale came about.
Humanity owes so much to people like Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Georg Ohm, James Maxwell, Hans Christian Orsted, Andre-Marie Ampere and others like them who, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discovered, developed, designed and invented electricity for us. The generator kept the light bulb glowing. This was invented by Thomas Alva Edison, an American, in 1878. Others have been perfecting it since.
A colleague comes into my room and reminds me of a meeting we have to go to. I reach out for my notepad and ballpoint pen. How convenient it is to use a flowing pen and then dispose it off when it finishes after some time. This convenient and utilitarian writing instrument was invented by John Loud, a British leather tanner, in 1888. About a hundred years before, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the industrial printing press was invented in Europe. It has improved tremendously since. Earlier, the European Renaissance had seen the beginning of the development of printing press for mass production of books and newspapers. Imagine how would have we seen the number and quality of books, newspaper, magazines, packaging material, etc. so easily available today without an efficient and fast printing press.
Before leaving office, I requested a colleague to book me a flight for the coming Sunday for another city where there was a conference I was invited to. It would take me a month on horseback, a day and a half by train and two days on a car if Oliver and Wilbur Wright had not invented the airplane in the US in 1903.
After reaching home from work and before starting to write this piece, I switched on the television. The TV in your living room influences your thoughts, perceptions and emotions like nothing else. It was invented by John Logie Baird, a Scotsman, in 1926. He demonstrated it for the first time in London. There was a talk show in Urdu on air when I started watching the TV. The eminent anchor of the programme and the more eminent commentators were busy bashing the western world – their loss of values, their lack of humanity and their domination over our people and our lands. The west was being seen and discussed as a monolith. Froth was coming out an eminent intellectual’s mouth (he considers himself an intellectual so I call him such). He also said that it is Muslim scientists who made enormous contributions for the benefit of humanity. There he is right.
It was Bu Ali Sina or Ibn Sina (Avicenna as he is called in English) who created the first refrigerated coil, something that people improvised and now use in air conditioning and refrigeration. He revolutionised Greek medicine and ruled the world of health and medicine until allopathic ways of healing and amazing inventions like penicillin and anaesthesia started dominating.
We must also not forget that the germ of the theory of disease came about just a couple of hundred years ago in Europe. Ibn Sina lived in the eleventh century. Also, it was Muslims who converted a dip pen into a nib pen in the eleventh century. It was Abbas Ibn Firnas who flew with a set of wings in Muslim Spain in the ninth century. Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Al-Khwarizmi, Jabir Ibn Hayyan, Ibn Al-Haitham, et al, made great contributions to human knowledge. But Muslim contribution did not go beyond the fourteenth century.
The inventions our life is dependent upon today were all made in the western world in the last three centuries. This coincides with the European Renaissance, the period of enlightenment, the age of rationality, the development of philosophy, art, science and technology, the separation of religion from the state.
While condemning the political and military power used to suppress other parts of the world, could we ever deny the command of the west over the realm of knowledge? So asking for education does not make Malala or anyone else pro-west. It makes them pro-knowledge. That is the spirit needed among us all when we are dominated and oppressed. For it is no other but the greatest prophet who said once that the ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of a martyr.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com