gulftoday.ae | Popular UAE exhibition returns to US
Long overlooked, the remarkable contributions of Muslim scholars in science and technology have quietly floundered as no more than common footnotes of world history. Abbas Ibn Farnas and his flying glider, Al-Jazari’s engineering marvels and Al-Khwarizmi with his pioneering method of study and calculations for the movements of the sun, the moon and the five planets known at the time, all but lost.
“This dynamic exhibition challenges the way we examine history and encourages the need to embrace multi-cultural knowledge in a global society,” said Mike Hackworth, lead director, The Tech Museum. “Many of our visitors will be surprised to learn that from these ancient desert cities came the theory of vision, techniques of quantitative chemistry and trigonometry and the numeral systems that we use today.”
Now the visitors can discover the innovation, science and technology mastery of one of today’s most misunderstood cultures at the “Islamic Science Rediscovered”, opening at The Tech Museum. The global exhibition celebrates the contributions of Muslim scholars during the Golden Age of the Muslim World (700 - 1700 CE), in the arts and astronomy to engineering and exploration - discovery that, in some cases, came centuries before Western innovation.
MTE Studios CEO Ludo Verheyen said, “Each dedicated cluster will educate and entertain visitors of all ages and expects to attract even bigger audiences at Tech Museum. MTE Studios is honoured to be working with such an accomplished and esteemed venue and looks forward to the opening at The Tech Museum.”
MTE Studios was commissioned to design a large themed mall named the Ibn Battuta Mall, in Dubai.
During the research stages whereby MTE Studios studied the 14th century architecture of Muslim Spain, North Africa, Egypt, India, Persia and China and came across a most interesting image of an old manuscript, depicting a life-size Indian elephant, with an Arabic castle on top and various sculpted figurines and animals such as Chinese serpents. This was visualised to become a unique sculptural element for one of the courts within the Mall. This sculpture was, in fact, a clock, an ingenious device named, as per the manuscript, the Elephant Water clock and designed by the 14th Century Muslim engineer Al Jazari.
