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All great civilisations have something to learn

I refer to the letter Whimsical interpretation of Islam wrong .

While the contribution of the brilliant Arab mathematicians in developing the decimal system cannot be denied, it should not be forgotten that it is not something that they invented from scratch. It is an established historical fact that it originated in India. The Arab mathematicians made significant contributions by adding zero, fractions, etc.

That is why historians nowadays formally refer to it as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The term Arabic numerals came into popular use because the 12th century Europeans borrowed it from the Arabs. I am surprised that Abdul Rahman Abdul Talib has failed to realise all this. He could find all of this information in any decent encyclopedia

If I may be permitted to use a clich, the moral of the story is that no one civilisation should claim exclusive monopoly on knowledge or glory in any field of human endeavour. As world history amply illustrates, every great civilisation had something to learn from that which preceded or co-existed with it.

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