THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ARABS AND MUSLIMS IN THE SCIENCE OF BLINDNESS

Every nation has its own cultural heritage on which its elements of identity are built.  And it hopes to derive from it the conditions of its renaissance. The Arab and Islamic nation has a huge and diverse heritage that has accumulated over many centuries, in which Arabs and Muslims have excelled and made their mark in various modules of science and knowledge. They were also exceptional in writing many books which reflected tremendous contribution of Arab and Islamic civilization to the development of human knowledge as a whole.

With all the efforts of the contemporary scholars to study and review this vast heritage, and their attempt to benefit from it as much as possible, owing to the range of difficulties and obstacles; numerous of those valuable writings and manuscripts remained in the shelves and antique bookstores.

This humble research is an attempt to identify one the most important Arabic and Islamic sciences that have been long ago marginalized and forgotten. This is about cryptography. This science was originated and developed by Arabs. They contributed and excelled in it and wrote many works on it.

Cryptography is the science that studies the ways and the methods of storing information by transforming this information from its natural form into an incomprehensible form, and finding the appropriate way to transform the information from the first to the second or vice versa.