قرطاس الدراسات الحضارية و الفكرية
Volume 18, Numéro 2, Pages 89-108
2026-07-31
A Thousand Years Before The Emergence Of Artificial Intelligence: Arab And Muslim Scholars Laid The Foundations For Algorithms, Robots, Automation, Intelligent Machines And Cryptography
Authors : Rezgui Hayat .
Abstract
While Arab and Muslim scholars did not invent artificial intelligence in its modern form, historical evidence demonstrates that they laid its conceptual foundations centuries before the digital age. Artificial Intelligence should therefore not be regarded as a purely Western achievement; rather, it is the product of cross-civilizational interaction, in which Arabs and Muslims played an early and foundational role — long underacknowledged in conventional historical narratives. This paper offers an historical reading, doing justice to the undervalued legacy of Arab and Muslim scholars —long before Silicon Valley— when Baghdad, the beacon of science and the heart of Arab and Muslim civilization, was experiencing the dawn of Artificial Intelligence in all its facets: Building intelligent machines, developing programming, working with algorithms, analyzing codes, and processing data. This was more than 1000 years before the birth of the British computer science theorist Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) recognized today as the first to lay the foundations of Artificial Intelligence.
Keywords
Artificial Intelligence ; Algorithms ; House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) ; Scientific translation movement ; Arab and Muslim scholars
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