The untold story of Arabic brilliance should be a timely reminder of a proud heritage, says Jim Al-Khalili

Next year, we will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and the 150th of the publication of his On The Origin of Species, which revolutionised our understanding of biology.

But what if Darwin was beaten to the punch? Approximately 1,000 years before the British naturalist published his theory of evolution, a scientist working in Baghdad was thinking along similar lines.

In the Book of Animals, abu Uthman al-Jahith (781-869), an intellectual of East African descent, was the first to speculate on the influence of the environment on species. He wrote: "Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring."

There is no doubt that it qualifies as a theory of natural selection - even though the Book of Animals appears to have been based to a large extent on folklore rather than on zoological fact.

Despite the strong feelings Darwin provokes among many Muslims - many Islamic scholars see the Koran as creationist, and so at odds with evolution - it seems astounding that al-Jahith's quote has been largely ignored.

In fact, although popular accounts of the history of science typically show no major advances taking place between the Romans and the Renaissance, al-Jahith's work was part of an astonishing flowering of invention and innovation that took place in the Muslim world, and in Iraq in particular, in the Middle Ages.

This world view, based on a mixture of theology and rational thinking, produced wonderful advances in philosophy, astronomy, medicine and mathematics, in particular the emergence of algebra and trigonometry.

Although the Muslim world is often now seen as ill-equipped for scientific discovery, we can look back to Baghdad and see the origins of the modern scientific method, the world's first physicist and the world's first chemist; advances in surgery and anatomy, the birth of geology and anthropology; not to mention remarkable feats of engineering.

For 700 years, the international language of science was Arabic; and Baghdad, the capital of the mighty Abbasid Empire, was the centre of the intellectual world. The story starts around 813, when the caliph of Baghdad, al-Ma'mun, is said to have had a vivid and life-changing dream. In it, he met the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who instructed him to "seek knowledge and enlightenment".

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