Not Prophet’s ‘tied rocks,’ but a Cairo airport sculpture
A recent Facebook post featuring an image of a floating rock has claimed that the Prophet Muhammad (SM) tied two rocks together with rope in this manner roughly 1,400 years ago. However, Dismislab’s fact-check has found that the image actually shows a sculpture by an Egyptian artist installed at Cairo International Airport in Egypt.
On August 27, a page named “Esho Deen Shikhi” (Let’s Learn Religion) posted the image in a Facebook group named “Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamat Bangladesh.” The image was captioned, “The Prophet tied this rock 1,400 years ago! ‘Alhamdulillah’.” The post also read, “Please comment “Alhamdulillah”…” As of the publication of this report, the post had received more than 1,000 reactions, 40 comments, and had been shared seven times.
The image was also found to be circulated with the same claim on various other pages (1, 2, 3) at different times.
To verify the image’s authenticity, Dismislab conducted a reverse image search. This led to the discovery of the same image on the stock photo provider Alamy. The caption of the image, written in French, read, “Optical illusion sculpture, Shaaban Abbas, 2008, Terminal Three, Cairo Airport, Egypt.”
According to the Egyptian government’s official website on fine arts, works by Shaaban Mohamed Abbas are housed at the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo, Cairo International Airport, and the Garden Museum of the Gezira Art Center. He died on November 17, 2010, at the age of 41.
Regarding a similar claim, the fact-check division of the international news agency AFP published a report on August 14, 2019, stating that the floating-rock artwork was Abbas’s work. India’s fact-checking organization SM Hoax Slayer also published a fact-check report on this in 2017. The optical-illusion-creating artwork has been seen spreading false claims in various countries and languages for nearly a decade.
