Funny old world. Muslims insist they are doing Jihad and joining the Islamic State in the name of Allah to further his religion and the BBC insists they are not. They are, the BBC insists, deluded, ignorantly perverting the religion of peace and doing things Muhammed would never have countenanced…despite the ISIS blitz across the Middle East being exactly what Muhammed did…conquering and colonisation, chopping off heads, taking sex slaves, knocking down temples and destroying ‘idols’. It is the 7th century brought to technicolour modern life.
However, someone makes a highly dubious claim that the Vikings were a little bit Muslim and the BBC is there embracing this new ‘fact’ and spreading the glad tidings across the world. Muslims aren’t Muslim enough for the BBC but Vikings can be declared ‘Muslim’ on the evidence of a small piece of embroidery on a piece of cloth.
Some might think the BBC was doing the embroidery, of history that is.
A Swedish ‘academic’ has announced that she has discovered the word ‘Allah’ woven into Viking textiles…the BBC report this as absolute truth…
The question should of course rather be ‘Did the Vikings embroider ‘Allah’ into their clothing?’ but that’s not a narrative the BBC wants….it wants us all to think Islam was widely accepted as a good religion by everyone throughout history and thus we should accept that ourselves never mind all the evidence that this just isn’t true and that Islam is far from the religion of peace that the BBC would have us believe.
The BBC farms out the job of reporting this to a Muslim….Tharik Hussain is a London-based freelance journalist, travel writer and broadcaster who specialises in Muslim heritage. So what we get from the already Islamophillic BBC is a Muslim, whose job is to promote Islamic heritage and interests, to report impartially upon a controversial subject. Naturally what we get is a complete acceptance of the story and the spin that perhaps some Vikings were Muslim….more evidence…a silver ring with an Islamic inscription upon it….no thoughts that this could have been a gift, traded, pillaged or brought North by a slave….it’s a definite sign the Vikings were a little bit Muslim.
The ‘academic’ is in fact a contemporary artists who says “a cliché is something that we are supposed to see in a certain way. When you get close to it, it can have a new meaning – it is that twist I am interested in.” So she is interested in twisting our perceptions….creating new meanings. She certainly did that with her ‘Islamic’ inscription…it has to be rotated and have extra script added to it to make it into ‘Allah’…as even the BBC admits…
Enlarging the patterns and looking at the reflection in a mirror revealed the word ‘Allah’ (God) in Arabic
‘Enlarging the patterns’ is disingenuous….she actually added parts to it not merely ‘enlarged’ it which gives the idea that it was merely magnified.
What is magnified though is the conclusion….from a scrap of ‘evidence’ we are expected to believe that maybe some Vikings were Muslim and Islam had a significant presence in Europe…this is pure pro-Muslim propaganda not news…literally smoke and mirrors. If the BBC had asked a few questions they might have found a different narrative instead of BBC ‘Truthiness’….
“Vikings had rich contact with the Arab world. This textile? No,” she began, noting that the textile “has no Arabic at all but the story has gone viral” thanks to news outlets like the Times and BBC.
“There is something very troubling here about the relationship between news media and experts, who should have been consulted for verification,” she continued. “It should go without saying that a single scholar’s un-peer-reviewed claim does not truth make.”
“Here’s the deal with Viking ‘Allah’ textile, as I have been able to piece it together over past few days. As an Islamic art historian & archaeologist, I was immediately suspicious about style of Arabic epigraphy. It’s really so simple that I spent five days thinking, it couldn’t be that Larsson would make so fundamental and obvious a mistake,” said Mulder.
Mulder explained that the most obvious issue with Larsson’s methodology was that the Viking textile is dated to the 10th century, while the style of epigraphy in Larsson’s drawing comes from the 15th century.
“It’s a style called square Kufic, and it’s common in Iran, Central Asia on architecture after 15th century,” she said, providing an example of the style.
She added that the earliest example of the style dates to 11th to early 12th century Muslim architecture—all dating to at least 100 years after the Viking textile found in Birka. She also noted that Larsson’s drawing of the word “Allah” in Kufic script wasn’t even common until the 15th century.
In other words, Larsson and her team’s findings are the result of pareidolia—they saw Arabic patterns where there weren’t any.
Mulder’s debunking of Larsson extended to the rest of the textile, as well. She pointed out that Larsson’s claims are based on supposition, and not proof.
The professor also stated that the only reason the story went viral was because of contemporary politics.
That the Vikings had contact with the Middle East and the Far East has never been in dispute. Mulder said that the “Allah” textile exhibits what Stephen Colbert referred to as “truthiness” despite being unanchored from reality, because it helped to reinforce a specific narrative.
“But ‘truthiness’ cannot be enough for news media, especially in this age of accusations of #FakeNews,” said the professor, who urged journalists to “pick up the phone” and call experts before publishing their stories.
The Independent has corrected its original story…
Medieval Islamic art and archaeology professor Stephennie Mulder disputes the findings, saying the inscription has ‘no Arabic at all’
The BBC has yet to do so, the original story going un-updated. But then why wouldn’t ‘Allah’ appear in Viking clothing…his name appears everywhere else, Jesus and Abraham were Muslim don’t you know…….which must prove something about Islam if only the BBC could think of it……
Proof ISIS is Muslim…Allah gave them the sign to dress infidel disbelievers in orange jump suits and to behead them…..
And Christianity is toast….