This project examines how scientific knowledge from the Middle East has been marginalised, fragmented and ‘omitted’ within modern Western education, focusing on UK GCSE science textbooks. Instead of serving as a corrective or alternative textbook, the work challenges the book form itself as a site where authority, history and ideology are constructed and stabilised.

The project consists of a handmade bookwork composed of scanned pages from GCSE biology, physics, and chemistry textbooks taken from multiple exam boards. These pages are preserved as institutional artefacts rather than being rewritten or summarised. These pages then undergo a process of palimpsest, from a controlled layering of annotation, redaction, original diagrammatic overlays and spatial reorganisations informed by Islamic manuscript traditions.

Carrying on from my previous investigations into the Vinegar Bible by John Baskett and rubrication, I bring the act of annotating in red ink as an editorial device, which also echoes medieval scholarly practices where marginal commentary guided interpretation. The rubrication highlights omissions, reframes attributions and reintroduces erased lineages of knowledge without overwriting the modern narrative. The use of selective redaction further exposes absence, which brings to light how histories are suppressed or made invisible.

The work treats the textbook as an ideological object rather than a neutral container of facts. It poses the question on how educational systems shape collective memory, how non-Western history is subjected to being edited through form, and the meaning behind recovering knowledge that has been structurally marginalised rather than simply forgotten.