Your coffee

Cultivated in Yemen and spread through Sufi lodges, where it kept worshippers awake for night prayers, then through Ottoman coffeehouses to Vienna and the world. "Coffee" descends from the Arabic qahwa; "mocha" is the Yemeni port it shipped from.

Your numbers and your algebra

The digits 0-9 reached Europe via the Muslim world (Europeans called them Arabic numerals), and al-Khwarizmi's book al-Jabr named algebra. His own name, Latinised, gave us "algorithm": every app you use runs on a Baghdad scholar's surname.

The camera

"Camera" comes via the camera obscura that Ibn al-Haytham described around 1020 CE while founding modern optics, and his insistence on repeatable experiment made him a father of the scientific method itself.

The hospital

The bimaristans of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus were the first true hospitals: free at the point of care, with wards, teaching, pharmacies, and, remarkably, music and storytellers for the mentally ill. Medical licensing exams appear there too.

The university

Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, founded by a Muslim woman in 859 CE, is recognised as the world's oldest continuously operating degree-granting institution. The academic gown and the "chair" of a professor both echo madrasa culture.

The guitar

The oud came through al-Andalus to become the lute ("lute" is just al-oud), ancestor of the guitar. Flamenco's deepest roots reach through Moorish Spain.

Soap, as you know it

Hard soap from olive oil and lye is a Levantine Muslim-world product (Aleppo and Nablus soap are still benchmarks); a religion requiring five daily washes was a civilisation that industrialised hygiene early.

Even "alcohol"

The word is Arabic (al-kuhl), from Muslim chemists' distillation work; so are alkali, alchemy-then-chemistry, and elixir. The lab vocabulary of Europe was learned from Arabic books.

Your flight's navigation heritage

The astrolabe was perfected by Muslim astronomers (partly to find prayer times and the qibla from anywhere), and star names on modern charts, Aldebaran, Altair, Betelgeuse, Vega, are Arabic fossils in your planetarium.

Your pantry

Sugar (sukkar), syrup (sharab), candy (qand), lemon (laymun), orange (naranj), spinach, saffron, apricot, artichoke, rice's westward journey, and the three-course meal itself, credited to the Baghdad-to-Cordoba tastemaker Ziryab.

Your living room

Sofa (suffa), mattress (matrah), ottoman, divan, carpet-culture generally: Europe furnished its comfort with Arabic words because that's where the comfort was.

Your vocabulary's hidden Arabic

Admiral (amir al-bahr, commander of the sea), magazine (makhazin, storehouses), tariff, traffic, cheque, arsenal, average, monsoon, safari, zenith, nadir, zero, cipher: roughly a thousand English words carry Arabic passports.