Did Al Farabi really invent sociology?

There is a subtle campaign on Wikipedia to overstate the contribution of Islamic sages to scientific scholarship.
James Hannam says that the facts should be sacred

As an author who craves all the publicity he can get for his work, I’m usually cock-a-hoop to receive invitations to pontificate on film. Even the lowliest producer can expect to have me eating out of her hand. But last week, when I received an email from a filmmaker who wanted to interview me for a programme about ‘the scientific evidence in the religious text of the Koran’, I thought I’d give it a miss.

The sort of apologetics which attempt to prove the inspiration of the scriptures by showing that they contain secret knowledge has been practiced by conservative Christians for a very long time. Back in the 17th century, English divines tried to develop a biblical science to compete with the new philosophy of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Some Muslim apologists like Caner Taslaman, author of The Quran: Unchallengeable Miracle, have still greater ambition. They claim to find the discoveries of modern cosmology, such as the Big Bang and Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, written into the Koran.

Such ‘evidence’ for the divine origin of the Koran was never likely to convince Islam’s Western admirers. Instead, a more subtle campaign is being waged to persuade us that Islam’s role in the rise of modern science was a great deal more significant than realised. There is some truth in this. For instance, Alhazen made important contributions to optics which Johann Kepler eventually used in his foundational work on the modern theory of vision. Likewise, mathematical constructions invented by Muslim astronomers may have found their way into the work of Nicolas Copernicus; but his central idea that the earth orbits the sun was never considered in Arabic science.