Historians are regularly asked about the relevance of their work. A common answer is demonstrable public interest. Such interest as reflected in visitor numbers exists in the case of the travelling exhibition 1001 Inventions, launched in 2006 and organized by the Manchester-based Foundation of Science, Technology and Civilisation. The exhibition seeks to illuminate scientific achievements in Islamic history and their impact on scientific developments in the West. The accompanying volume with the same title likewise enjoys considerable success.
Popularized versions of history often meet with indifference among professional historians. In this case, the organizers of the exhibition earned the fierce criticism of a group of scholars around Sonja Brentjes and Taner Edis. The present volume describes efforts for direct conversation which appear to have ended in frustration.
Among the various areas covered in the present volume, the refutation and correction of several sections of the 1001 Inventions exhibition constitutes a centrepiece. The articles are supplemented by others which deal with ideology, popularization of knowledge and the history of science. It must be emphasized that the critics by and large share the goals of the 1001 Inventions team. They acknowledge that popularization entails simplification. Indeed, several contributors (especially Sonja Brentjes about education, Jeffrey A. Oaks about mathematics, Taner Edis and Amy Sue Bix about flying devices and Rainer Brömer about the circulation of blood) write in a clear and concise manner about subjects which are often not very accessible to outsiders.
Likewise, several critics acknowledge that in order to get general audiences interested in history and science, it is a good strategy to identify prominent individuals who belong to a community these visitors identify with and who may serve as role models for young audiences in particular. The parallel of historical female role models is sometimes adduced. Also, the critics who contributed to the present volume share the view that Muslims of the premodern period produced considerable achievements and that this is a history Muslims can be proud of today, especially in light of the Islamophobic polemics discussed by Vidar Enebakk in this volume.
Where the critics disagree most strongly is how this case is made. And they disagree in both areas fundamental to the 1001 Inventions project: history and science. A frequent criticism is the assumed universality and collective representation of accomplishments of the entire Muslim community. Such a generically representative function in and of itself is highly dubious, but more specifically it is unclear why these individuals should be primarily classified as Muslim. Indeed, as pointed out in the volume, not everybody who contributed to science in the Islamicate world was Muslim. Questions about the significance of religion also pertain to the nature of the knowledge these individuals produced, the purpose for which they produced it and the methods they employed. Petra Schmidl discusses this aspect in her very accessible introduction to the astrolabe and comes to the conclusion that astrological and religious purposes were secondary at best. Although this argument in a narrow sense is convincing, the assessment does not exhaust the potential significance of religion in general or Islam in particular for the production and transmission of such knowledge.
While the critics occasionally acknowledge that the organizers and contributors to 1001 Inventions are not historians, which may explain and perhaps even excuse some of these inaccuracies, the second set of criticisms is more troublesome. For while the organizers of the show command expertise primarily in sciences and technology, the critics identify a range of problems grounded in scientific misunderstandings or misrepresentations. Some accounts (e.g. in mathematics), they conclude, are so poorly written that the historical achievements are incomprehensible, in other cases the assessment of past achievements is overly optimistic (e.g. in the case of the flying attempts). Other failures are due to the organizers' desire to make past advances recognizable in modern terms. Indeed, that the organizers ignored the massive gaps between medieval and modern science in order to exaggerate historical Muslim contributions is the main criticism. With these flawed methods and misrepresentations, the organizers are not doing their Muslim audiences a favour, the critics argue. Several contributors emphasize the need for academics to develop and improve their own strategies for popularization. Successful examples presented in the book include Stefan Weber, director of the Museum für islamische Kunst, Berlin, and Peter Adamson, who publishes a popular podcast on the history of philosophy.
To a considerable extent, this book is clearly a work of polemic. Some contributors do not mince their words when they express their criticism and frustration. This puts readers in a difficult position, especially as far as representations of interactions between organizers of 1001 Inventions and critics are concerned, for we only get one side of the story. Furthermore, while most readers sympathetic to the editors' cause will probably have never seen the exhibition, those who have been drawn to it may be put off by the criticism. For either group of readers, a more consistent engagement with academic literature on the subjects of heritage and museums and their political and educational intricacies may have been more rewarding.
A prominent theme in the book is the relationship between authority and knowledge. Some of these insights could be easily applied to the volume under review itself. Outsiders to the various sciences will accept the explanations of various contributors because of their institutional authority, mostly as professors. On the other hand, much of the criticism listed in Hadi Joráti's article, for example, is fairly pedantic while the author himself summarizes Orientalism on a couple of pages which contain just as many generalizations as some of the criticized statements in the 1001 Inventions exhibition. In some articles, it is clearly the source rather than the contents of a statement which determines its validity. In her discussion of Convivencia, for instance, Manuela Marín acknowledges that this notion has been the subject of academic critique. Rather than addressing this critique, however, she states that Convivencia has been “a convenient and acceptable label for research proposals” (78). The editors may have found a similar pronouncement made by amateurs far less adequate.
In sum, the decision to foreground the criticism of the 1001 Inventions exhibition and volume does not make this book a consistently pleasant reading experience. Nor is it likely to contribute to a constructive discussion with the organizers of the show. Readers interested in the history of science and the challenges of popularizing it should, however, not be put off by the occasionally strong polemical tone. Most contributors write in a lucid style about a range of relevant subjects and identify issues all academics interested in popularization inside and outside of the classroom may want to engage with.
