Ottoman History Podcast - Forging Islamic Science

Episode Date: February 2, 2019

Episode 400 with Nir Shafir hosted by Suzie Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, Nir Shafir talks about the problem of "fake minatures" of Islamic science: small paintings that look old, but are actually contemporary productions. As these images circulate in museums, on book covers, and on the internet, they tell us more about what we want "Islamic science" to be than what it actually was. That, Nir tells us, is a lost opportunity. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson. We're excited to welcome today to the other side of the mic, Dr. Nir Shafir, editor and frequent host here at the podcast, this time to discuss some of his own research. Our conversation today is about what Islamic science is, what we want it to be, and how it's sometimes portrayed by museums, on book covers, and in the back alleys of Istanbul's Book Bazaar. and in the back alleys of Istanbul's Book Bazaar. All of these topics and more are taken up in Nir's recent article, Forging Islamic Science, which is now out online with Aeon magazine. So we're on the trail of a phenomenon that Nir has been following for a while, the trail of the fake miniature,

a small painting which is often sold to tourists that's made to look old but is in fact of pretty recent origin. Right, precisely. So when you think about these things, imagine these fake miniatures, often of sort of scientific endeavors, a Ottoman scholar looking at a map, an Ottoman scholar looking through a telescope at the stars, maybe a medical procedure, these sorts of things. And if you're listening on your computer or you have your phone with you, we'll also put up some of these images on the website so you can take a look yourself. Right. So let's start out today by asking you, Nir, how did you come across the problem of the fake miniature? It actually started about a year or two ago when we were collecting images for the podcast to put up on our website. And as we were kind of crowdsourcing images,

a lot of the images that were being sent in were these miniatures, purported miniatures from Ottoman manuscripts depicting men doing science. And as I said, these are sort of often people looking through telescopes or images like that. And I quickly realized that something was off and that these were actually fakes that you would buy in the Sahseller's market. And it became an even bigger issue because as I was teaching a class called Science and Islam, so I'm an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and I was teaching for the first time this class called Science and Islam. And I had signed for my students a book by the scholar of Arabic literature, Elias Mohanna, called The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Eurodiction. And this was a translation,

a partial translation of a 14th century encyclopedia by this Mamluk scholar. And on the very cover, as one of my students actually noticed, was one of these fake miniatures. And I wondered, how is it that on the cover of this respected book, something like this had ended up? How do you know that these things are fake? In this case, what I had to do is track down the original image. So if you look at the book cover, what you see is two men looking at a night sky, one through a telescope and one pointing up at the star, and they're in a sort of tower. So you have the kind of this traditional vision of early science,

you know, men contemplating the stars. And in this case, we know they're Muslim because it's kind of drawn in this style of Persian miniature. They have turbans on, they have beards, looks Islamic. But what I did is I did a Google image search, found the fuller image because it was just a partial crop. And what I found is that there was another two figures that had been cut out. One was another man looking through a telescope and then a third or fourth man with a hand on a globe taking notes in a book with a quill. In this case, the quill is what gave it away because people in the Middle East didn't actually use quills to write.

They used read pens. And so I quickly realized that this just wasn't right. So you had to be a pretty careful observer, in other words, and also a pretty knowledgeable observer to be able to tell that this thing that looked both very Islamic and very scientific was not original to the period that it claimed. Yeah, I mean, in some senses, it's quite hard to tell. Just looking at them today, the colors seem a bit too bright, the brushstrokes are too clean. But also what they do and how they

trick you is by painting them on top of old leaves of manuscripts. What these people do is that they take old manuscripts, often Turkish religious texts from 200, 300 years ago, they slice out a page, they paint over a good portion of the text, and then they paint the scene. So what you see often is a bit of Arabic or Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, and then you think it's real, but then if you actually read the verses or the text there, it has nothing to do with image at all. And then often you can see where they have actually painted over the vowel markings or things like that. So let's talk about who's the they. Maybe you can just take us through the life cycle of one of these fake miniatures. Where do they come from? How do they circulate? And where do they sometimes end up? To be honest, I don't actually know exactly where they're made. I've never been able to track them fully down.

But I'm assuming there's workshops that are making these around Istanbul. Some are quite high quality. Some are, you know, very quickly drawn. They depict things that people want to buy. Often this is images of Muslims doing science. People like tourists or Istanbul or who who buys these things it's a mix i think it's you know tourists are they're often in the grand bazaar next to the grand bazaar uh they're sold in antique markets things like that so it's both tourists but also

obviously a lot of turkish people non-tourists even as when i was here as a student i didn't realize that they're fakes and i wasn't't quite sure, you know, are these reproductions or not. I was tempted to buy one. So it's a very alluring purchase, right? It's a very beautiful little thing. And a lot of people end up buying them. What's interesting is that they eventually end up in the hands of museums, collections, and most problematically on the internet. So from this tourist market, they get sold on to often book dealers, things like that. These people in turn sell it to museums and private collections. And this is how it seems starting in the late 90s, these miniatures started popping up in all sorts of different places. And the problem is that along the way, the question of whether

they're actually original to the period that they claim to be from or whether they're actually very recent reproductions kind of gets lost like by the time they make it into a museum collection is it unclear how old they are well the museums they don't have the expertise to tell whether these are real or not they just want to buy uh something signifying islamic science or islamic. And often the price is not so high, maybe a thousand or a few hundred euros, that they're willing to buy this to kind of make a gamble, even if they're not quite sure what it is. And this is how it ends up in the hands of these people. So I was able, thanks to the help of the Whipple Museum,

to track down how some of these entered into their collection. The Whipple Museum is the Museum of History of Science in Cambridge University. From there, you also find them in a whole variety of other places now. The biggest shift though, and this is what really turns this into a viral phenomenon, is when these entered the internet. And this actually just happened maybe about less than 10 years ago. Somehow, there was a photographer who's identified as Gianni Daliorti, who I've never been able to track down. I can't even tell if he's a real person, but he is someone famous apparently for photographing museum collections. He took a lot of photos of a number of these fake miniatures and essentially put them up in these stock image services.

Now, stock image services are what provide the images for the Internet. So whenever you go to a BBC article or any sort of newspaper article, any website you see, obviously these people are not shooting their own photos. They're just buying the rights to use these photos because we have to illustrate everything on the internet with an image. And so these stock photo services basically all take the same photos and then just sell them for sometimes a dollar or two for small usage to thousands of dollars for a major publication.

So it sounds like what we have here is a problem about how to tell what's real on the internet, which is maybe a bigger problem in our current day than just the question of fake miniatures. Precisely. Once it gets on the internet, it's really hard to figure out, are these real or not? Because if you assume that if, for instance, Getty Images or the Wellcome Foundation or even these museums of history of science are putting these images online, that they are real and therefore I can use them. Right, we trust these institutions to be checking that the things that they're putting out are actually real.

Right, at any step we kind of give, there's a sort of chain of trust. Everyone kind of trusts the person before them, and then passes it on. And that's how it ends up on the cover of my colleague's book, which, by the way, I have to say, Elias Mohanna was extremely helpful in helping me track down how the image ended up on his book. And he was also very supportive of this research. So I don't want to cast any aspersions. Why is it a problem that these images aren't real? They're beautiful. They're an alluring purchase. They make great book covers book covers they go viral which is what any scholar

now wants right in the internet age what's wrong with it i mean what's the problem well in this case i think there's a major problem in that we're actually turning away from what was actually produced in the period whether the early modern period or the medieval period and we're kind of opting instead for these recreated or reimagined fakes of what we want islamic science to be and the unfortunate reality is that there just actually isn't very many images of people doing islamic science for instance again this question the telescope telescopes are extremely well were known once they were invented in the 17th century telescopes are extremely rare and as far as i know there's no actual depiction of anyone using a telescope

on a miniature but the telescope is the kind of emblem of scientific modernity and so therefore we want people to to show that muslims were also using them right so these are the these are kind of recognizable images of islamic science so we're taking the images that we associate today with what science looks like, like the gray beard with the telescope, and literally pasting them over either other representations, visual or otherwise, of what Islamic science actually was,

or the fact that there weren't representations of it at all. Precisely. In this case, what they're doing is actually destroying older manuscripts in order to paint these new scenes. And this is not something just related to Turkey. I was just in Uzbekistan. I saw the same thing. The same thing is going on in India. This is actually now a major worldwide trend of touristic artifacts, in which people have now destroyed hundreds, maybe thousands of manuscripts to create these. in which people have now destroyed hundreds, maybe thousands of manuscripts to create these.

But on top of this, the larger question here is actually, how was Islamic science depicted? What images do we actually have? And this is a more difficult question, because the reality is, is that of the millions of manuscripts out there, I would say maybe there's one to two million Islamic Arabic script manuscripts out there. We might have 10 to 15 books with illustrations of people doing science. So it was unusual to actually provide visual representation. It's extremely rare. So rare that in all my perusals of manuscript libraries, I've seen maybe one. Why do you think that was? Why was it so unusual? Because I think we just, they lived in a very different visual culture than we have today. Today we're obsessed with images and this is, you know, Instagram and Pinterest and the internet. Anyone can take a phone and this is why the images have to be embedded in our articles,

embedded in our presentation. We want to share them all the time. We live in this culture of vernacular images. And even though this started probably in the 60s and so forth, it's really taken a new momentum since the Instagram age, since the smartphone era. And we have, I think, a hard time kind of grappling with the fact that their notion of and use of images was quite different. They being Islamic scholars of the, say, 15th to 18th centuries? I would say, you know, to be honest, all most pre-modern humans, but especially, let's say, in the Middle East, this area that we focus on, you can imagine that most people in that period would actually never have

seen or easily seen an image that is like a painted representation. There's, of course, calligraphy, which is a different sort of visuality. There's all these other things involved. They have their own visual culture, but it's not one of a mimesis of reality. So when you write an article about corn, you don't have to then provide a picture of an ear of corn next to it. Precisely. And this is obviously the way newspapers were before the 1980s. So but there's a question here, which is how did what what images of science do we actually have depicted? And this is a sort of more interesting one. Let me start with maybe probably the most famous one, the one that's kind of on every cover of every book on Islamic science, of which there are not that many books. But if you do see it,

you've probably seen this, which is the depiction of the observatory of Murad III in the late 16th century, which was built for a very short period in Istanbul. And you have in here about 15 men in turbans using different scientific instruments. You see an astrolabe, you see a quadrant, you see a sextant, you see even a globe of the world, which is very interesting. This is kind of the paradigmatic image that we want of Islamic science. Unfortunately, this is quite rare, and no one's really actually figured out kind of why did they decide to visually depict it in this sense. A bit more common is another image illustrating the previous observatory. Again, the images were often done for manuscripts that were copied hundreds of years later. So these are

kind of representations of what they thought work in astronomy would be doing. And there's one from the Observatory of Maraga. Maraga is now in Azerbaijan, I believe, or northern Iran. And you have a group of scholars hunched over books. There's a sort of astrolabe hanging, but it's not actually being... What's an astrolabe? An astrolabe is an astronomical instrument that's used to measure the incline of a celestial body in the sky. So whether the moon, the stars, planets, things like that.

Now, when you look at this picture, you have them kind of looking at an astrolabe, but actually most of their attention is fixed on these books, which I presume they're using to compare astronomical calendars or previous observations, things like that. So again, it's a very bookish view of science. Their attention's not actually focused on the instruments. It's actually focused much more on texts. I mean, it's really interesting because what you're describing is a visual culture that's not obsessed with images or direct mimetic visual representation the way we are today. And even when you do get visual images,

they often are about men looking at books. Right, precisely. Yeah, so it's a very unsexy vision. I don't know, maybe we should have an Instagram account that is just pictures of men looking at books and see how we do. Men at books. It's a good point.

There's many different ways of creating and understanding images. And another example is this visual depiction, a sort of argument for alchemy made in 1339 in Baghdad that Persis Berlekamp has worked on. image. What you see is on the left a sort of evangelist-like figure holding open an open tome with an image of planets. So a man looking at a book in which there are images. Precisely. And then on the right is another interconnected scene of a group of men pointing at a small flock of birds, about 10 birds, flying underneath a window with a woman looking out. So this is an alchemical, allegorical type of argument. This is a scientific illustration, but we never think about it because we want people actually fiddling with instruments. Because today, nobody would look at a group of three turbaned men pointing at birds in the sky and think they were doing science. Is that right?

Precisely. And I think that's what we have to get at. We have to get at this different visual understanding of science in general. And not just a visual understanding. I mean, in fact, that is a very different kind of practice than what we now consider the scientific practice that goes on using high-tech instruments in a lab. practice that goes on using high-tech instruments in a lab. Precisely, and it's much more scholastic. In this case, the argument is about rediscovering ancient knowledge that has been locked away in books, usually a secret book, maybe from ancient Egypt or before, something like that, that is then rediscovered, and then the secrets of the universe are revealed to the alchemist, the king, whoever, the scholar. So it's a very different conception and very different temporality of how science functions science and also the fact that something like alchemy itself was included in the practice of science which of course now very few universities have a chair of the science of alchemy right this is um yeah i think that's very correct previously especially uh before maybe 10 15 years ago we

didn't really take alchemy or astrology seriously as sciences. Now in the academic professions, at least we in the history of science, we take it quite seriously as a very constitutive and productive part of early modern science. But these are obviously not things that are depicted in the miniatures, nor for that matter in the museums. So this is really a lost opportunity for us, you know, by the fact that we use these fake images of telescopes rather than the real images of men looking at birds in the sky is actually a lost opportunity to broaden our idea of what science used to mean.

Precisely, and it's not just in the miniatures. It actually extends to museums of history of Islamic science. And I want to bring up this example of the Museum of History and Technology of Science in Islam in Istanbul. It is located in Gulhane Park. It's an interesting, well-built, very professionally created museum. And as you go through it, you'll find something interesting. You'll start with, again, astronomical instruments,

then you'll go to instruments of war, different sort of engineering things, then you'll enter maybe a section on chemistry and these sorts of apparatus, maybe something about optics. But you quickly realize that what's actually happening here is that none of the objects are real. They're all recreations. Now, this is very different. They're not trying to fool a tourist here. They're actually trying to show the sort of genius of Islamic science, the wonders of Islamic science, by attempting to recreate objects that no longer exist, that we have no record of. Some of them,

I have to admit, are objects like astrolabes that we have in other collections that they maybe couldn't get a hold of, and so they recreated them. But many of them are also objects that we're not actually even sure were really ever built. So the most interesting example of this is these kind of fantastical mechanisms of al-Jazari. these kind of fantastical mechanisms of al-Jazari. Al-Jazari was a scholar living in kind of what is now northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, in the 12th century. And he is often called this sort of Muslim father of engineering.

And he made this book called The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. And in it is a whole variety of different things, but most of them are kind of these Rube Goldberg type of contraptions to create various mechanical effects. So the most famous ones, maybe you've even seen these, are a sort of like elaborate water clock in the shape of an elephant with a rider. And then as the water moves through and would take time, the rider kind of does different things. And a lot of these are actually recreated in miniature and real life in this museum. The problem again with this is that we're actually not sure if these existed. It's not even sure how his book was meant to be read. So we're imposing a present day reading of this book as if it was

like a set of technical guidelines for building a device when maybe it had... Well, I want to point out that modern engineers say that with their interpretation that these devices work. That being so, it's still not clear exactly how were these being used because none of these actually survive. The closest thing that we have to any of his surviving contraptions is actually a door that was built after his death, but it's very similar to the model that he built. It was basically a bronze door with very elaborate decoration. So, you know, this isn't a giant water clock.

This isn't a weird machine. This is a door. And it doesn't appear in the Museum of Islamic Science and Technology. No, it's basically up the street at the Art History Museum in the Türk ve İslam Esseleri Müzesi. And it also leads us to this question of why are we using

the images from his book to recreate these objects? Why can't we just collect the objects that exist? Why do you think that is? Well, I think part of the problem is that when we look at what's left today of the material culture of Islamic science, it's not very wondrous. It doesn't easily excite you the same way seeing a giant elephant water

clock would. And that's because I think in this era that we live today, we want to use science to redeem Islam, whether as a culture or religion or as a people. We live in a highly, highly Islamophobic world in which Muslims are constantly being pushed out of the political community of various societies, both in the West, but also in the East. And in a sense, science is this sort of universal endeavor that all humans take part of. The best way to make Muslims human is... To show that they too did science on our terms. Right.

You know, there's this shift here. In the past, people would read books like Al-Jazari, these books of ingenious devices, as an act of wonder. They would read them because they didn't understand them, because they're sort of ingenious devices that no one knew how they worked precisely, and maybe you would imagine them. And this was sort of part of their vision of medieval vision of wonder, of trying to understand things in the world that don't seem to have any readily apparent cause. But now we've kind of shifted it over. The wonder doesn't stem from the objects themselves or why they work. It actually stems from the fact that they were made by Muslims in the past

or imagined by Muslims in the past. So in a way, what museums are engaged in in the present day is a political project of trying to include Muslims in the history of a global science that is understood in very presentist terms. And so in a way, we're losing an opportunity to not only to broaden our idea of what science was, but also our idea of what wonder was, what discovery was, what visual representation was supposed to be. idea of what wonder was, what discovery was, what visual representation was supposed to be. And so while we might say, okay, these museums are doing important political work, you're pointing out that there are some pretty serious downsides to approaching the problem this way. Precisely. And let me just reiterate, obviously Muslims had science. The question is, we can show that story of science in much more accurate and I think much more honest ways. I want to give maybe some examples of how I think this can be done. One, not all of the museums in Turkey are dealing with Islamic science or bad.

I just went to Edirne and I saw the Salik Musisi, the health museum. It's recently been given new displays. And I thought it was quite good. They actually show you a variety of artifacts. Most of them are real. Some are, they still do the same thing, where they're recreating medical instruments from these manuscripts. But there's also a good amount of dioramas and other things using real objects that they're trying to show. They also do a few more fanciful things. For instance, the people behind the museum belong to a very interesting and good school of history of medicine in Turkey

that always invested in recreating miniatures of Islamic science. These are obviously not attempting to fool anyone. They're reimaginations of scenes from these medical texts. And so they make clear what are the things that are actually left, actually remain from the past and what things are re-imagined or are new. Yeah. And I think that's an important intellectual step to say, you know, this is my re-imagination of it. And of course, there's nothing wrong with imagination. I think this is fundamental to the very craft of history because we can never actually fully know what people lived or experienced. And I don't want to just say,

let's return to the facts. Let's go find real objects and put them there and call it a day. In fact, I think we have to be even more creative. And that's why I found actually the most inspiration down the street at Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence. Now, the Museum of Innocence is a museum that's actually based off of a fictional narrative. And you go inside, and it's little display cases, kind of dioramas, of objects from the novel, which depicts this sort of long-standing back-and-forth and obsessive romance between the narrator and his beloved Füsun. And as you go through, you can listen to the narration and the objects come to life in a mix of Orhan Pamuk's and the narrator's voice,

or you can just go through and try to kind of understand it as just a collection of objects telling the history of Istanbul. The interesting thing about the museum is that these are real objects. I mean, these are, say, raka bottles from the 1950s, which is the period that the book was set, used to illustrate or to sort of give body to a fictional narrative. Precisely, and it's this whole,

he's, you know, Orhan Pamuk spent years and years going through the antique stores and rubbish markets and things like that of Istanbul to collect the detritus of the 1970s. So in a way this is the exact opposite process from a museum that is trying to recreate in the present objects discussed in manuscripts in the past this is the opposite approach. Yeah it's collecting the objects first and then writing the narrative. Now, the funny thing is, is that when you're in the museum, you never actually know, did he write the novel and

then find the objects? Did he even create the objects? Some of them are actually created. Did he find an amazing object and then write a story about that? And that's, I think, the fun part about the museum. It's not there to make you doubt what's the function of museums. It's not this kind of totally postmodern skeptical take like the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. It's actually a more fun, playful, and interesting piece of work that makes us really think, well, what are the role of objects in crafting historical narratives? And opens up, as you say, this space of many possible kinds of imagination that happen between a real or a creative a created object and a story about the past right and i think this is the sort of lesson we can take from this museum

because at the end of the day when you go through this museum you really you you understand individual people's lives you start thinking about what were they living through what did they interact with what objects did they interact with and i think that's the whole point of a museum and that's the point of having real objects there we're not just having a narrative shoved down our throats or imposed upon us we see the objects we see some information and then we kind of create a sense of what it was in the past and get some and we have to engage in an imaginative process about the individual, like, actual lives of people who lived in the past,

which is part of the task, as you say, of doing history at all. Precisely. Well, Nir, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast today on the other side of the mic, as it were. It's a hard position to be in. I think today we've learned a lot about visual culture

in the present and in the past. We've learned about the narratives that we want from Islamic science and also about what what we might find if we actually looked at what remains. And we've also thought a little bit about what it means to do you know to do public history scholarship or museum curation in a moment where museums play a really important political role in shaping our impressions of the Middle East and other parts of the world, but also have maybe an opportunity to change the way we think about the past.

Thank you, Susie, for summing it up so nicely. And I think this is really what we need to have a shift in our representations of Islamic science. We need to go away from these fantastical machines or giant works of genius to look at the individual lives and how people in individual cases throughout the Ottoman Empire before created science. And this can be in the way a midwife might have created a medicinal recipe, in the way that a imam might have calculated prayer times using astronomical instruments, the way the judge would do algebraic equations to divide inheritance, or a whole variety of other situations.

But it's these lives, this focus on the kind of individual stories that Orhan Pamuk's museum does that we need to recreate. And in a way that this is another narrative about what it might mean to inhabit a shared humanity, right? It's not that we all created elephant water clocks that may or may not have existed or functioned it's that people everywhere in almost all times and places have engaged in exactly the kind of daily practices of engaging with objects in the world that you describe and that that's as much of a shared human tradition as is looking at the sky with

a telescope, for example. Yeah, precisely. It's this science as daily lived practice, the science of merchants, the science of blacksmiths, the science of midwives, which I think we can all point to as a sort of a shared human experience of science, of trying to understand the natural world. And I think that's both the more intellectually honest way of doing and studying the history of Islamic science and I think a more capacious understanding of why Islamic science should be. Yeah, and what science is as a human practice in general.

So thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's been really interesting to discuss this work, and I encourage our audience to read the article. Right. It's out in Aeon, and there'll be an academic version, a longer academic version, hopefully in the Journal of History of Science. And please send us pictures of you bent over the text of the article so we can put them on our People at Books Instagram account. We'll also put a bibliography for this episode up on our website, www.adamandhistorypodcast.com. And that's all for this episode. Until next time, take care. Altyazı M.K.