«A Turkish man invented the steam engine 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, but used it only to turn doner kebab,» – you have surely seen similar posts in entertainment groups on social media. Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf al-Shami al-Asadi did indeed develop a steam engine that could be used to rotate a spit, but his contribution to science makes him one of the greatest scholars of the Islamic world. Astronomy, engineering, mechanics, medicine, mathematics, and optics – such was the range of interests of the scholar sometimes called the «Muslim Leonardo da Vinci.»