When is a mall not a mall?… when it also an interactive science museum. James Reinl takes us on a tour on Ibn Battuta Mall’s Dh16m interactive exhibition – 1,000 Years of Knowledge Rediscovered – and meets the man behind it
An exhibition showcasing the centuries in which the scientific achievements of the Muslim World outshone progress in stagnant Europe is currently taking shape – not in a museum, but in a shopping center.
Ibn Battuta Mall has already established a reputation for recreating Islamic history by staging the 120,000km journey of its namesake explorer through the décor of the 1.3km-long egifice.
Now, the brains behind the mall’s elaborate interior, Ludo Verheyen, director of the MTE Studios, says it is time the great inventors, mathematicians, and scholars of the early Islamic world get the recognition they deserve.
“Ibn Battuta Mall already lends itself to showing people aspects of history that they didn’t know about,” says the 48-year-old Belgian. “Particularly about this period of about 1,000 years ago when Europe was in the dark ages. But when you go back to the subject you find a wealth of knowledge and information that hasn’t properly communicated to the world. A lot of inventions that are claimed in the Western world were actually discovered in the Middle East.”
Taking pride of place in the mall’s Andalusia Court hangs a tribute to Abbas Ibn Firnas, a daredevil scientist from Cordoba, in Spain, who built a glider and soared from a tower over the Islamic-governed city in AD875.
“He had spent a long time studying the flight of birds and covered himself and his craft in feathers,” says Verheyen. “There were lots of spectators there. He jumped and stayed in the air for a few minutes and could even control his flight by using flaps, like those found on the wings of an aeroplane.”
While history books tell of pioneer flight attempts by Renaissance thinker Leonardo da Vinci in 1496, and the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, in 1903, Verheyen says that Ibn Firnas “got there first” and deserves his own mention.
As a testament to the inventor – a learned chemist, physicist, and astronomer who developed stained glass, a water clock and crystal cutters – the MTE Studios team spent four months building a replica of the glider.
INTERACTIVE MODELS
At their production hub in Cape Town, South Africa, a crew of engineers, designers, and carpenters stretched silk cloth over a lightweight ash frame and fixed a mannequin with a leather harness – identical to the documented original’s five-and-a-half meter wingspan.
The flying machine is one of 27 interactive models that will be installed by March 15 in a showcase of Islamic inventiveness that has been dubbed “1,000 Years of Knowledge Rediscovered”.
“It was the golden age of the Islamic World,” says Verheyen, referring to the period between AD750 and AD1500 when the philosophers, scientists, and engineers of the region inherited and developed ideas and technology from the civilizations of the Middle East, Persia, Greece, and India.
“The area of the Islamic world was huge,” adds the father-of-two. “It covered all the regions Ibn Battuta travelled through – Andalusia, Tunisia, Egypt, Persia, India, and even parts of China.”
Already established as a favourite of mall visitors is an eight-meter tall replica of the elephant clock devised by the 12th century Mesopotamian engineer Ibn Ismail Ibn Al Razzaz Al Jazari, whose gear mechanisms were far ahead of his European contemporaries. “He is regarded as the first person to invent the robot,” says Verheyen. “There wonderful ingenious clock devices were based upon a fluid system in which the mechanism was triggered by the movement of water.”
Al Jazari shocked his contemporaries with the time-telling devices, says Verheyen, but avoided allegations of wizardry by housing his creations in exquisite and elaborate designs that featured mythological creatures.
The clock took a team of 120 researchers, engineers, industrial designers, carpenters, and artists a total of 11,000 working hours to create, using the same metal and hard afromosia wood materials as the original.
Mall visitors can watch the mechanism ticking over, the dragon-serpent, falcon, and elephant rider moving and the clock dial shifting every 10 minutes, says Verheyen. Fans will be able to see the internal mechanisms of a sister exhibit – a replica of Al Jazari’s castle clock, complete with the quintet of model musicians who strike up a tune every half-hour.
Tunisia Court will feature another of Al Jazari’s work – replicas pf a medley of water-raising devices that the inventor created to help farmers increase their agricultural area by irrigating arid soils.
EARLY CAMERA
like all the mall’s exhibits, the water wheel, cattle-powered water screw and aqueduct models were inspired by historical research from the Manchester-based Foundation for Science, Technology, and Civilization and a private body called Muslim Heritage Consulting.
The water feature display stands on a bed of Italian marble and occupied 45 designers and builders for seven months.
An early pinhole camera devised by optics expert Ibn Al Haythen is due to feature in Persia Court, after the mathematician’s ninth-century birth in Basra, then an important Persian city.
His influential work includes the seven volume treatise on optics, Kitab Al Manazir – one of the first studies to use experiments to prove a theory – which he wrote in Cairo while under house arrest for feigning madness in a bid to avoid working on a Nile flooding project.
Meanwhile, India Court will feature the surgical tools devised by 13h century physician Ibn Al Nafis, who trained in the Syrian capital, Damascus, before heading to Egypt an embarking upon a 300-volume encyclopaedia and expounding groundbreaking theories on the human cardiovascular system.
Other exhibits include the armullary sphere, a model of the celestial movements invented by Greek astronomer Eratsothenes in 255BC but developed in the Islamic world up to nice mteres high to aid stargazers.
All the models are interactive and encourage the participation of mall visitors, says Verheyen, notably the mini-observatory in Persia Court that allows users to select the views of stellar constellations from different locations across the Muslim world.
“We are trying to communicate science and technology in an entertaining way,” he says. “We call it edutainment – it is education, but not boring. It is something that draws people’s interest. Something they interact and play with.”
Verheyen cites research that indicates only 15 per cent of a child’s knowledge is obtained from formal education – with that figure dropping to as low as three per cent for adults.
“That is where we come in. we design and research prototypes and then manufacture interactive displays for science centres, museums, and shopping malls,” he adds.
GUIDED TOURS
He describes a growing number of retail centres that house technology zones to occupy enquiring, young minds – but notes that no mall owners went as far as Nakheel – Dh16 million was spent to create the Ibn Battuta Mall exhibition.
“There are a few examples in the world where a shopping mall has a science centre,” says Verheyen. “But this has got to be the first where schools are sending their children in groups to a mall to learn about science and history.”
Greg Parvess, 24, is one of the six guides at the mall who gives school groups and visitors a tour of the exhibits, while recanting the tale of 14th century Berber traveller Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta’s epic journey.
“We get families from all over that have decided to want to learn something about Islamic heritage,” says the South African acting graduate. “Recently I’ve had people from the UK, the US, Kuwait, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.
“Most of the people are very impressed and like it very much. Before I started working here, I had no idea that Muslims had contributed so much to modern civilization, and that is something we are trying to put forward with the exhibition. They were responsible for so much in the fields in astronomy, medicine, and mathematics – even creating the number system from one to nine that we still use today.”
While Verheyen is maintaining how shopping malls can give museums a run for their money by providing “edutainment” to the masses, Parvess and his colleagues are getting ready to guide growing numbers of visitors around the exhibition once it is on full swing.
“I believe that once the Ibn Battuta Mall exhibition is properly marketed it is going to be a major attraction,” says Verheyen. “This kind if thing has not been done before. Tourists should come and see it and should be marketed worldwide.
“This project has been created out of passion to do something exciting and it goes beyond normal engineering. It deals with so many facets of life and so many different people to convey a fascinating subject.
“So much care has been taken to make the exhibition comes together. These models are not plastic and they have not been made quickly.
“These are major features that have been built to be timeless.” |
