Aeon: Forging Islamic science
Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How?
As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dress, examining the starry sky through telescopes. The miniature purported to be from the premodern Middle East, but something was off.
Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The telescope was known in the Middle East after Galileo developed it in the 17th century, but almost no illustrations or miniatures ever depicted such an object. When I tracked down the full image, two more figures emerged: one also looking through a telescope, while the other jotted down notes while his hand spun a globe – another instrument that was rarely drawn. The starkest contradiction, however, was the quill in the fourth figure’s hand. Middle Eastern scholars had always used reed pens to write. By now there was no denying it: the cover illustration was a modern-day forgery, masquerading as a medieval illustration.
The fake miniature depicting Muslim astronomers is far from an isolated case. One popular image floating around Facebook and Pinterest has worm-like demons cavorting inside a molar. It claims to illustrate the Ottoman conception of dental cavities, a rendition of which has now entered Oxford’s Bodleian Library as part of its collection on ‘Masterpieces of the non-Western book’. Another shows a physician treating a man with what appears to be smallpox. These contemporary images are in fact not ‘reproductions’ but ‘productions’ and even fakes – made to appeal to a contemporary audience by claiming to depict the science of a distant Islamic past.
From Istanbul’s tourist shops, these works have ventured far afield. They have have found their way into conference posters, education websites, and museum and library collections. The problem goes beyond gullible tourists and the occasional academic being duped: many of those who study and publicly present the history of Islamic science have committed themselves to a similar sort of fakery. There now exist entire museums filled with reimagined objects, fashioned in the past 20 years but intended to represent the venerable scientific traditions of the Islamic world. read more
h/t AmericanDigest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reBzU8E_Ajk
i laughed when i read this story last month. glad you finally got it here.
its about a culture so desperate to be acknowledged that they exist they have to make shit up and steel others achievements and pass them off for their own.
From the picture, looks like George Clooney pretending being what he has always been and remains a mentally ill deluded actor since the early days of Rosanne. Sorry, It’s my own sallowness. Like Jim From ‘Taxi’, “I’m I right?’
Of course everything in the article that is talked about is fake. To me, the author sounds like an apologist for the many scams and scourges that constitute islam at its core. If any of the things mentioned in the article were from earlier than the last couple of decades, they wouldn’t exist at all these days because the islamic mob would have already destroyed them for being “un-islamic” (think Palmyra or the Buddhist statues that were obliterated by moslems in Afghanistan for recent examples).
Islam always has and always will be about anything but conversion by the sword of anyone that doesn’t submit to the perverted wishes of the adherents of islam including worshiping their moon god. There is no room for “science” or anything else in the minds of truly devoted moslems.
One of our sons had several post-doctoral Arabic PhDs in his lab years ago – before Oscuma’s “budgets” eliminated research funding. He told us of their astonishing ignorance of science and scientific methods as well as of, for example, arguments about human anatomy clearly refuted by available texts and research.
When one of one’s first principles is to define reality exclusively by the 400+ year old dicta of an illiterate “prophet” and to lie to infidels about anything and everything, that’s what you get.
BTW, students from the PRC are the vast majority of the occupants of all those labs today.
You are all Islamophobic h8rs who hate science. The article is clearly the work of right wing djinns. You ignorant bigots.
We would not even have a space program without them!
(According to Obama.)
Mohammys brought only death and despair,FGM,honor killing and inbreeding.
What’s the smallest muscle in a Goat?
a moslems c*ck
Islamic Science bears a striking resemblance to Bobby Boucher’s mother in The Waterboy.
Alligator mad because Jews stole his toothbrush.
But science knows alligator ornery ’cause of medulla oblongota.
Worm-like dental demons are why you should always floss daily and brush after every meal.
It is certainly true that the “Islamic World” made worthwhile contributions to science and mathematics. What isn’t discussed is the degree to which those contributions were made by not by the Muslim conquerors themselves but by people from the more advanced societies they enslaved.