I have to comment on this absolutely misleading nonsense. Thread to follow. (1/9) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/13/looted-landmarks-notre-dame-big-ben-st-marks-east-stealing-from-the-saracens?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

This book, as reported in the review and implied by the title, makes a mockery of the vast amounts of real looting undertaken by Europeans due to colonialism.
Secondly, it isn’t uncovering anything that wasn’t patently obvious to anybody who knows the period already. (2/9)

To frame it as ‘plunder’ anachronistically places Western Europe in a light of superiority at a time when the Islamic world with its centre in the Middle East was famously technologically advanced.
(3/9)

Furthermore, some of the book’s claims as reported in the article are misleading at best or outright wrong: for example, nobody stole the ‘recipe’ for stained glass. (4/9)

European medieval glass production developed along different lines to medieval Islamic glass production, and both stemmed mainly from the Roman industry. (5/9)

The title of this book - ‘Stealing from the Saracens’ - is flippant, Orientalising (by homogenising the vast Islamic world with ‘Saracens’ - presumably for alliterative purposes) and misleading. (6/9)

The so-called ‘meticulous research’ is simply somebody putting an antagonistic spin on decades of existing scholarship. It is designed to polarise people when what we need are nuanced conversations. (7/9)

News outlets and media generally are obsessed with things ‘taking us by surprise’ and being ‘new’ because they don’t think that we - the general public - are intelligent enough to handle that nuance. (8/9)

That’s why I create online content. I want to offer something for the intellectually curious that doesn’t patronise or gate-keep. (9/9)