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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2025

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  • Yes: that’s the listing I went through. What you’d conclude from the documentation is that, at some point during the nomination process, the Government of Morocco made that claim. They’ve either since withdrawn the claim, or UNESCO has removed it. But, as with any false claim, once made it gets repeated, and the later repetition gets cited as evidence for the original claim (a form of circular citation, and one that historians get quite annoyed by because it’s usually quite a deliberate attempt to ‘hack’ the record).


  • The UNESCO claim seems to be false, too. There is no mention of al-Qarawiyyin in UNESCO’s description of the Medina of Fez: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/170

    In any case, UNESCO make it crystal clear that they only publish the nomination description, which is written by the state party (in this case the Government of Morocco). UNESCO understandably and explicitly disclaim the description documents, and only publish them for transparency.

    I do wish we didn’t have these reality-distorting memes everywhere. Leave them to the far right - they don’t do Islam any favours, and they piss off real historians.