However, the idea of using cat-gut to do stitching was certainly brought first to the West during the Golden Islamic era. Moreover, the organized university used only in the West for several centuries entered the West through Cordoba, Granada, and Selvilla settlements of the Islamic Empires in Spain during the Dark Ages. The Arab inventions in science, cartography, and inventions of new devices were the reasons why the best sailing technologies known in the 15th Century enabled the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese to travel and circumnavigate continents. In short, the Western Renaissance was formed in the bellies of Islamic Universities, the knowledge of which were used and appropriated by secular European an Christian educators. This flowering of Islamic educational knowledge soon evolved into Western focused schools of science, literature and technology from the 16th century onwards.
Final NOTE: In the book by George Makdisi, entitled the RISE OF COLLEGES: "It is stated that Muslim institutionalized education was religious, privately organized, and open to all Muslims who sought it. It was based on the waqf, or charitable trust. The state or governing powers had no control over the institution but instead the content of education and its methods were left to the teaching profession itself because the founder was usually a layman guided by the wishes of the professor for whom he instituted his foundation." Once secularism took hold in Europe, the idea of a universal educational system open to the masses would take hold. It was this idea of the universal right of education which eventually appealed to early founders and citizens of the U.S.A. in the late 17th through early 19th centuries, leading America to eventually lead the world in the sheer number of higher educational institutions created in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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