Liberals everywhere loved it! The claim that the Vikings had been found worshipping Allah was just too good true. And there was a reason for that – it wasn’t!
A Swedish academic made the startling claim that they had discovered the word ‘Allah’ embroidered into ancient Viking burial clothing. These findings have now been questioned by experts claiming the inscription “makes no sense in Arabic.”
Annika Larsson’s findings, which concluded that the inscriptions were evidence that Viking “burial customs were influenced by Islam and the idea of an eternal life in Paradise after death,” were widely reported last week as a ‘historic first’.
Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas, Stephennie Mulder, however, claims there is a “serious problem of dating.”
Mulder explains that the Kufic script didn’t exist at the time of the Vikings and that even if it did, the inscription still doesn’t mean anything in Arabic.
Mulder adds that Larsson’s claim is “based on extrapolation, not evidence,” citing a textile specialist, Carolyn Priest-Dorman, who writes that the interpretation is based on “extensions of pattern, not an existing pattern.
Priest-Dorman and Mulder’s analysis details how the texts say ‘Allah’ only if you presume that the embroidered fabric was originally twice as wide as it is now and that the pattern was replicated in specific ways, leading Mulder to say that “Larsson’s extensions are entirely conjectural.”
In other words, she made it all up!
