The Arabic manuscript Orient fol. 3306 preserved at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin was in its original form a precious collection of Arabic scientific texts of mechanics and optics. It contains a fragment in one folio page consisting in a brief characterisation of the five simple machines: lever, windlass, pulley, wedge, and screw. This short text and is attributed to Sinan ibn Thabit, the son of Thabit ibn Qurra and a known mathematician and physician in Baghdad during the 10^th century. It is a new source that has never been studied before. In the following article, we present the Arabic text of Sinan ibn Thabit and its English translation, accompanied with historical and analytical commentaries.

Abdel Aziz al-Jaraki

From Frankfurt and Cairo to Damascus: Recent Models of the Umayyad Mosque Clock, The Umayyad Mosque Clock, Abdel Aziz al-Jaraki, Eilhard Wiedemann, Fritz Hauser, Fuat Sezgin, Donald Hill, Ridhwan al-Sa'ati, Banu Musa, Al-Jazari, Al-Khazini, history of clocks, Islamic technology

Most educational systems, particularly those of Western countries, teach that industry was born in Europe and that the Industrial Revolution was the mother that delivered industrial mass production. Salim Al-Hassani, Chairman of FSTC and eminent expert in Islamic science and Muslim Heritage at large, challenges this view and presents an overview of the industrial and engineering processes which preceded the Industrial Revolution. Examining briefly the vast industry which stretched from China to Spain during the Muslim Civilisation (eighth-seventeenth centuries), he presents an overview of some randomly selected aspects of Muslim industrial production which highlights not only the Islamic antecedents of many processes and products widespread in our modern industrial system, but also how erroneous is the opinion that industrial production was alien to Islamic society.

Among the original machines described in the corpus of Islamic technology, the six-cylinder "monobloc" piston pump designed by Taqi al-Din Ibn Ma'ruf in the late 16^th century holds a special place. Working as a suction pump, this complex machine included components that are often associated with modern technology, such as a camshaft, a cylinder block, pistons, and non-return valves. In this article, Joseph Vera, an expert in re-engineering ancient inventions, describes how he created a SolidWorks CAD model of this remarkable pump, that he completed with a motion simulation. The conclusion he drew after creating the model and the simulation is that the engineers of the Islamic tradition, represented by Taqi al-Din, had a very solid grasp of kinematics, dynamics and fluid mechanics. He notes also that Taqi al-Din's "monobloc" pump is a remarkable example of a machine using renewable energy, a topic that is currently of utmost importance.

In the following essay, Dr. Gunalan Nadarajan, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State University, draws on the work of al-Jazari, the famous 13th century Islamic scholar, engineer and scientist, to develop an alternative history of robotics. The work of Al-Jazari is considered as a significant contribution to the history of robotics and automation insofar as it enables a critical re-evaluation of classical notions and the conventional history of automation and therefore of robotics. In his analysis, the author details the notion of "Islamic automation", where the notions of control that have informed the conventional history of automation and robotics are substituted by subordination and submission to the rhythms of the machines.