“Forging Islamic science – Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How?”, Aeon:
“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……”
Read the full article at Aeon.co
