Fake islamic miniatures depicting science in academic books & libraries

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

https://aeon.co/essays/why-fake-miniatures-depicting-islamic-science-are-everywhere

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Interesting essay - not questioning the legitimate achievements of Islamic science, but showing how representations of it have been fabricated to meet modern popular expectations.

[Karpatsky]

Plus, aren't any portrayals of humans forbidden in traditional Islam?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Plus, aren't any portrayals of humans forbidden in traditional Islam?

It's been discouraged to various degrees within Sunni Islam, though this varies by place and time and there are still quite a few examples historically.  Shia Islam allowed a strong tradition of figurative art to develop in Iran and Iraq.

[dead0man]

[(no subject)]

There's a lot of modern claims that Indigenous Australians had advanced agriculture and building techniques. They didn't.

[Mr. Reactionary]

There are even some crazy conspiracies that Muslim explorers from Africa discovered America before the Europeans.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The important thing, and the interesting thing, is that this isn't crude and blatant myth-making believed only by a domestic audience (c.f. claims of nuclear weapons, space technology, etc. in Vedic period India), but a sophisticated pseudo-history that has as much of a pull internationally as domestically.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

There are even some crazy conspiracies that Muslim explorers from Africa discovered America before the Europeans.

I've seen the same claimed of the Ancient Chinese, the Romans, and even the Ancient Egyptians (supposedly, the latter is "proven" by the existence of pyramids in Meso-American civilization). Of course, even if these theories were true, they would be of marginal significance —because obviously the alleged proto-explorers didn't do anything with the information, even if they did "discover" America before Columbus. It's just the popular appeal of stories that tell us everything we assumed about the world is wrong and claim to present a long-lost secret history.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

There are even some crazy conspiracies that Muslim explorers from Africa discovered America before the Europeans.

Everyone knows that it was the Welsh that did it first.

[(no subject)]

It's also for political reasons - If progressives can get people to believe that Indigenous people were more advanced then they were, it'll seem more tragic and they'll be more anger at the Europeans for destroying them.

[Associate Justice PiT]

It's also for political reasons - If progressives can get people to believe that Indigenous people were more advanced then they were, it'll seem more tragic and they'll be more anger at the Europeans for destroying them.

     History being distorted to serve ideology is a serious problem, and one that emerges to varying extents in pretty much every culture. Foundational myths are a relatively innocuous example on the one hand, but then you get the Stalinist unpersoning of purged leaders in the USSR. I would tend to qualify conscious distortion to serve a particular end as being of a more serious variety, since even if that end is noble it is still by its nature dishonest.