User:Al-Andalusi/Draft2

Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn al-Khadr (أحمد بن يوسف بن الخضر; died 712 H/1312 AD), more commonly known as Zayn al-Din 'Ali ibn Ahmad al-Amidi (زين الدين علي بن أحمد الآمدي) was a blind Arab scholar most known for inventing a system before Braille that allowed him to study and recognize his books. His method involved the use of fruit stones as a reading means for the blind.

Biography
Al-Amidi was born in the town of Amid near Diyarbakır, a city in northern Iraq at the time. He traveled to Baghdad in pursuit of knowledge but eventually lived there until his death in 713 AH/1314 CE.

Although he was blind soon after birth, he led a studious life, interesting himself particularly in jurisprudence and foreign languages, notably Turkish, Persian and Greek."

He relied on selling books for his source of income, which earned him the respect of the people and the rulers.

Precursor to Braille
Braille was by no means humanity's first attempt at touch reading. In the 14th century, a blind Syrian professor named Zayn al-Din al-Amidi improvised a method by which he identified his books and made notes. "In his large library, he knew the place occupied by each book and on receiving a request for information could find the exact volume without assistance. He knew the price of every book, because for each new volume, he took a piece of fine paper, rilled it tightly between his finders and bent the coil in the contours of the Arabic characters, thus showing the price paid. He gummed these to the inside of the cover, making a surrounding frame of the same thickness of paper to prevent the raised characters becoming flattened, thereby preserving them indefinitely."

Salah al-Din al-Safadi (d. 1362) in his book Nakt al-Himyan fi Nukat al-'Umyan (Emptying the pockets for anecdotes about blind people) said in respect to the originality of al-Amidi: "In addition to his knowledge, he used to trade in books. He could pick out the desired volume, touch the book and determine the number of its pages; he would touch the page and determine how many lines it had, the type of script and its color, and he knew the prices of the books".

find a system of raised letters by embossing on the leather to form its own library.