The Celebration of Ibn Haytham’s Al-Manaazir Millennial Anniversary

Known in the West as Alhazen, Alhacen, or Alhazeni, Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham was the first person to test hypotheses with verifiable experiments, developing the scientific method more than 200 years before European scholars learned of it-by reading his books. Ibn al-Haytham was the first person to apply algebra to geometry, founding the branch of mathematics known as analytic geometry.

In his massive study of light and vision, Kitâb al-Manâzir (Book of Optics), Ibn al-Haytham submitted every hypothesis to a physical test or mathematical proof. To test his hypothesis that “lights and colors do not blend in the air,” for example, Ibn al-Haytham devised the world’s first camera obscura, observed what happened when light rays intersected at its aperture, and recorded the results. Throughout his investigations, Ibn al-Haytham followed all the steps of the scientific method. These enormous contributions had lead to important applications into modern science and medical approaches.

In conjunction with the celebration of Ibn Haytham’s Al-Manaazir Millennial Anniversary, IIUM is organizing International Conference of Health and Medicine. The theme for this conference is “An Applicability of Modern Scientific Technologies towards Medical & Nursing Researches”. This conference will be separated into two subdivision; hard sciences and soft skill sciences. The hard sciences will comprise the disciplines of Medical Biotechnology, Molecular biology, Optometry, Nutrition and Pharmaceutical researches. The soft skill sciences would be in Medicine, Surgery, Nursing, Public Health and Epidemiology researches.

Due to unseen contribution of Muslim scholar in modern science and medical fields, IIUM take an initiative to introduce to the community about their contribution. Islamization of the knowledge is one of the main visions of IIUM, therefore these efforts hopefully will enhance and encourage the new generation of Muslim scholars to follow the footsteps of our brothers in order to bring back and glorify the golden time of Islam which used to blossom yesterday.