Giving ancient Islam its due

In the 12th century, a Mesopotamian known as Al-Jazari invented mechanical devices that represent history's first robots - more than 200 years before Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a humanoid automaton. A few decades later, Egyptian doctor and theologian Ibn Nafis described the human circulatory system, almost 400 years before English doctor William Harvey published similar work.

These are but two examples of the huge advances that Islamic civilization contributed to science and technology during a golden age usually dated from the eighth to 13th centuries. It's these achievements that are celebrated in Sultans of Science, an informative if intellectually limited exploration of the topic now showing at the Ontario Science Centre.

Happily, this is an exhibition full of fascinating facts about the history of science and technology, peopled by such intriguing characters as Piri Reis, a Turkish admiral who first depicted the Atlantic coast of the Americas on a map in 1513, and Abbas bin Firnas, of Cordoba, Spain, who strapped wings to his body to make the first recorded human flight, in the ninth century.

Divided into brief sections on optics, astronomy, flight, exploration, mathematics, medicine, architecture, mechanics and hydrology, the show contains replicas of historical manuscripts and instruments. There is also a wide assortment of interactive gizmos, including a model of an early astrolabe, water wheels that will splash the visitor as they explain early Middle Eastern systems for bringing moisture to parched fields and thirsty cities, and an exercise in optics in which the hand proves incapable of tracing a pattern reflected in a mirror.

The centrepiece is a reproduction of Al-Jazari's famous elephant clock. Comprising an Indian elephant with a Moorish castle on his back encircled by two Chinese serpents, the famous clock is presented here both as a symbol of Islam's multicultural reach and its ingenuity: The device uses a float in a water chamber hidden inside the animal's body to trigger the timekeeping mechanism.

Sadly, this is also a show that insists, quietly but emphatically, that there is some kind of cultural contest in global history, and that these guys were the winners of their day.

The problem is that this exhibition, originally created for a shopping mall in Dubai in 2006 by the themed-architecture firm MTE Studios, is not a scholarly exercise: Your first clue is its repeated use of the term "Dark Ages" to describe the state of Europe at the time. Contemporary historians now largely eschew those words. Certainly, the Islamic world was civilization's bridge between the ancient world and the Renaissance, but how exactly learning was communicated from Islam to Europe is a question largely ignored here.

Europe was hardly "stagnating in the Dark Ages," if the medical canon written by Persian doctor Ibn Sina (or Avicenna) in the 11th century was widely enough known in the West to become a standard medical text there, as the exhibit tells us. And if the organizers are going to insinuate that the English doctor Harvey plagiarized Nafis, as they do, it would help if they talked a bit about the spread of Nafis's ideas outside Islam.

At its most subjectively silly, Sultans of Science invites children to use foam blocks to build both a round Roman arch and the Islamic Ogee arch (formed by two S curves that meet in a point). It then argues the superior merits of the latter, which it judges not merely stronger but also more aesthetically pleasing.

The exhibition pushes its definition of Islam's Golden Age all the way up to the 18th century, 200 years beyond scholars' most expansionary estimates, probably because that justifies the subtitle, 1000 Years of Knowledge Rediscovered. If you think of Western equivalents, science museums would be unlikely to organize a display in which Leonardo's early designs for a flying machine and Harvey's research into the circulatory system were lumped together as evidence of Western civilization.

Although not overtly political, this prepackaged exhibit is being touted by the Ontario Science Centre as a great multicultural outreach exercise in that institution's diverse corner of the city. If such an exercise in local Islamic pride may have made some sense in Dubai (although you could only hope that the United Arab Emirates has access to more sophisticated material about ancient Arab culture than that provided here), it seems rather removed from a Canadian context. Surely, all Canadians, whatever their ethnic background, can claim the same bragging rights to the achievements of a Leonardo as to those of an Al-Jazari; these great creators are all rather far removed from us by time and geography.

Of course, some corrective is needed to add the fascinating Islamic figures to our Eurocentric cultural lexicon, but every Canadian school kid must already have at least a passing awareness of Islam's great contributions to learning: The numerals we use every day are called Arabic for a reason.

This version of the Dubai show was recreated and rewritten specifically for the North American market and was displayed at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey before moving to Toronto. Clearly a lot of Americans have previously enjoyed it: As the show was unveiled for the first time in Canada this week, it revealed signage and display cases that were visibly worn, video screens already covered in fingerprints and a couple of interactive elements that were simply broken.

The physical evidence suggested that the Ontario Science Centre had merely uncrated the show, only reinforcing the unfortunate impression that Sultans of Science is Islam in a box. Ship it over from Dubai and just add water.

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Journey to Mecca

In addition to Sultans of Science is a new IMAX film, Journey to Mecca. It is based on the travel diaries of Ibn Battuta, a young scholar who crossed North Africa in 1325 on a pilgrimage to Mecca, thousands of miles from his home in Tangiers, enduring obstacles such as dehydration and bandit attacks. lbn Battuta ultimately joins the legendary Damascus Caravan with thousands of pilgrims bound for Mecca for the final leg of his 18-month journey. When he arrives in Mecca, the viewer experiences the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage that all Muslims must complete at least once in their lifetime, as he did more than 700 years ago.