From Art World News and the far left Independent, who covered the original story with some relish last week.
Islamic art historians and archaeologists are calling into question a Swedish medieval textile expert’s claim that the word “Allah” has been found on a 10th century Viking funeral garment discovered in Sweden.
Annika Larsson, a textile archaeologist at the University of Uppsala, published an article on the Swedish university’s website announcing the discovery, The story quickly went viral, largely because it seemed to counteract a far right-wing narrative that the Vikings represent a uniform Master Race.
Stephennie Mulder, an associate professor of Medieval Islamic art and archaeology at the University of Texas, was among the first academics to question the findings publicly in a series of Tweets. Speaking to artnet News by phone, Mulder emphasized that she does not dispute that interaction between the Islamic world and the Vikings took place; rather it is this particular piece of evidence, and the way the story was reported by the media, that concerned her.
She explained that there are number of issues with the interpretation of the text on the Viking silk band that don’t add up. The first and most glaring problem is that the text doesn’t seem to read “Allah.” “Instead the drawing says ???? ‘lllah’, which basically makes no sense in Arabic. “Arabic phrases like ??????? ??? al-hamdulillah incorporate ‘l-lah’ but don’t stand alone, and it’s spelled ??? with two uprights, not three.”
Additionally, there are no known examples prior to the 11th century of the style of Arabic writing that appears in the reconstruction drawing presented as evidence by Larsson, known as square kufic, Mulder said. The particular style in question, which features a unique hooked letter at the end of the word purported to say “Allah,” only appears after the 15th century. “Of course, something that comes 500 years later cannot influence something that came 500 years prior,” she said.
After consulting a colleague who’s an expert in Medieval Spanish textiles, Mulder said neither she nor her colleague had ever seen this type of square kufic in woven pieces of textile prior to the 13th century, another 200 years after the 10th century textile purportedly turned up in Scandinavia.
Why does this matter? As Mulder explained on Twitter (across five tweets) “When [the] medieval and particularly [the] Viking age is used as [an] ideological weapon by white supremacists, and scholars are risking [their] careers to fight white supremacist appropriation, then it matters that we get this right. [The] media can report on [the] diversity of [the] global middle ages without trumped-up scholarship. We need news media to be our allies, consult experts, and get the facts right.”
But the Independent won’t let Breitbarts definition of ‘Fake News’ deter them from a nice bit of re-writing history.
Responding to the dispute, Ms Larsson told The Independent: “These finds are with no doubt from the Viking Age. They are found in several of the Birka graves and Viking Age boatgraves north of Gamla Uppsala. The geometrical Kufi is also to be found in similar textile ribbons from Spain. “Even if the characters should be interpereted as “Illah” it is still Kufic, and as I have understood from the arabic experts it still refers to ‘Allah’.”
This is like the BBC who notoriously emphaisised during a history programme about Hadrians Wall, which was garrisoned for some years by legions from Syria and North Africa, that “Africans lived in England before the English”. None of these SJW historians ever emphasis that Christianity was the religion of North Africa and the Middle East before the Islamic conquest of the 8th century.
Or, more important to my mind, Greeks, Christians and Jews lived in Turkey long before the Turks arrived. The original Turks were a nomadic people who lived in central Asia (cf Turkmanistan). Many of them converted to Islam during the Muslim conquests of the 8th century. Some moved east towards China and are now the Uyghurs, others west through Persia to conquer Anatolia (a Greek and Christian land) after 1071. The name Turkey – land of the Turks came into use by the 12th century. So Turkey has been Turkish for 5 centuries less than England has been English.
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One Response
I thought about this story when I read it on the BBC. It seemed to me that it was possible that the cloth could have been obtained through the Vikings trading activities, they were very active in trading with theMiddle East. The Byzantium Emporor had a personal guard composed of Viking. But, I agree these sort of ‘clutching at straws’ stories are a betrayal of scholarship.