Tuesday, 7 February 2017

Trending on social media: “Statue of Liberty was originally Muslim woman.”

Unfortunately, this nonsense needs to be repeatedly debunked. The Statue of Liberty depicts the Roman goddess Libertas (Liberty), who corresponds to Eleutheria in Greek mythology.

The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi himself went on record in 1885 to refute the rumor that Liberty Enlightening the World was based on a statue that he had wanted to design for the Suez Canal in Egypt. According to him, “an evilly disposed newspaper” had published this false story which was then picked up by other papers.

At this period I was expecting to execute a statue of Egypt for the Suez Lighthouse. I even laid before Ismail Pacha a project. It was this that made an evilly disposed newspaper say, and others repeat, that I had executed a colossal statue for Egypt, which had not been used, and that I had resold it to the Society of the French‐American Union in order that from it might be made the Statue of Liberty.

Now, I never executed anything for the Khedive except a little sketch which has remained in his palace, and represents Egypt under the features of a female Fellah. Besides every one has seen the model of the Statue of Liberty made at Paris, and only evilly disposed persons are ignorant of what it has cost me. I have never answered these small cavilings, but I think that I ought to notice them on this occasion.

—Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, “Colossal Sculpture,” in The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World Described by the Sculptor …, New York: North American Review, 1885, 37. (Internet Archive) (HathiTrust) (This appears to have been previously published in The New York Tribune or The New York Times.)

Also, the Suez statue was intended to depict an Egyptian fallâḥ, an agricultural worker of no specific religious affiliation.

After I did this research, I found that others had done it before me: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/30989