Last week Swedish researchers claimed to have found evidence that a piece of Viking burial clothing contained Arabic script and references to Allah, but new research has proved the claims to be false.
The team of Swedish researchers from Uppsala University claimed that they had found at least two instances of Viking-age artefacts influenced by Islam. Archaeologist Annika Larsson said the cloth they reexamined had Kufic script from the Middle East, but according to a Medieval Islamic scholar that is impossible as the Kufic script was not invented until 500 years later.
Stephennie Mulder, an expert on Medieval Islam at the University of Texas at Austin, said that it despite there being proven contact between the Viking civilisation and the Muslim world, it was impossible for the textile to contain a script which had yet to have been invented.
“It’s a style called square Kufic, and it’s common in Iran, C. Asia on architecture after 15th century,” she wrote on Twitter.
Ms. Mulder slammed the media for reporting on the story without questioning Larsson’s conclusions saying the archaeologist’s “claim is based on extrapolation, not evidence”.
Mulder also added that even if the script was Kufic the word said: “Illah” and not “Allah”, which she wrote, “basically makes no sense in Arabic”.
The revelation is not the first scandal to affect Swedish archaeology in recent months. Svenska Dagbladet made the remarkable revelation in August that large amounts of new finds being excavated during building projects were going straight to scrap rather than being catalogued and preserved.
The historical authority responsible for the decision claimed the sheer volume of objects, including weapons, coins, and arrowheads meant there wasn’t time to examine it all, so they were being melted down instead.
In Sweden, there has developed an “Islamophile” movement among many academics, politicians, and left-wing activists. Even the Archbishop of Stockholm offered Muslims the ability to pray in Christian churches and told priests to remove the crosses for the Muslim worshippers.
In a bizarre video from a Dutch-made documentary on Islam and integration in Sweden, a left-wing migrant activist defended the Islamic practice of polygamy saying she wished her husband would take on another wife to help with the housework.
Even the Islamic practise of marrying underage girls has been tolerated in Sweden. A pregnant 14-year-old asylum seeker was allowed to live with her adult “husband” by the government until they were alerted to the fact that he was raping her several months later.