The acknowledgment of Islamic culture’s contribution to
Western civilisation remains, for the most part, restricted to
the margins of public knowledge in the West. In similar fashion,
much of the Islamic world remains unaware of its rich medieval
past, its scientific and philosophical dialogues with classical
antiquity and medieval Christian Europe. The figure of the cleric
played, and still plays, a blocking role in the interpretation of
history. The image of the terrorising “heathen Turk” in
sermons of Pope Urban II and St Bernard of Clairvaux proved a
comforting notion to the Crusader imagination. It was not just a
mere war, but became a Christian jihad. Despite this perception
of Islam, many denizens of medieval Christian West believed
otherwise. The Englishman Adelard of Bath (died 1142) was the
first significant populariser of the achievement of Islamic
learning. In these achievements, Adelard saw the apotheosis of
human knowledge. The Bodleian Library’s new exhibition, ‘Medieval
Views of the Cosmos’, centres on the Bodleian’s newly
acquired medieval Arabic treatise, the Book of Curiosities,
containing diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth, many of
which are without parallels. It dispels the miasma around this
period of history and charts an eclectic history of medieval
Islamic and Christian cartography, lodging the Book in its
various cultural contexts. The reception of Greek, Arab, Persian
and Indian influences aided the creativity of Islamic celestial
and terrestrial cartography. One such treatise, The Book of the
Constellations of the Fixed Stars demonstrates the cultural
diversity of Islamic civilisation. The teastained hues of the
folios display drawings of each of 48 classical constellations
overlapped by the pre-Islamic categorisation of stars called
“lunar mansions”. The representation of Orion as a
long-sleeved warrior armed with a celestial dagger, formed by
red-dotted marks, marries the potency of the visual imagination
with the human desire to make sense of one’s surroundings. Indeed, the spirit of human exploration lurks within maps of
five river systems in the Book of Curiosities; the Nile, the
Oxus, the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus. The serpentine
quality of the Nile, as it endlessly meanders from one end of the
manuscript to another, marked by small tributaries, is
remarkable. Furthermore, legends and myths come to form an aspect
of the tradition of Islamic cartography with the waqwaq tree, a
frightening component of the spirit of exploration. The depiction
of brown bodies sprouting out of green vegetation, hanging from
the branches, connected by voluminous capillaries of blood wavers
between grotesque and grand-guignol.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004
The Cosmos: A Curious Book of Dreams
