Posted on 01/29/2015 7:44:52 PM PST by marshmallow
Effectively exiled from his friary in Mosul by the Islamic State last year, Fr. Najeeb Michaeel, O.P. is working to preserve Christian manuscripts through digitization, recording a memory of Iraq's Christian past.
Najeeb Michaeel is an Iraqi native who studied in the U.S., and founded in 1990 the Center for the Digitization of Oriental Manuscripts to foster the collection and recording of ancient manuscripts which he had started in the 1980s.
Over the years, Fr. Michaeel has collected some 750 Christian manuscripts in order to preserve them and to make them available for study by making digital copies.
The archives of the Dominican order in Iraq are a testimony to the Christian presence in Iraq, which stretches nearly 2,000 years in cities such as Mosul and Bakhdida, which are now controlled by Islamic State.
Mosul had had a Dominican friary since the 1750s, with both friars and the Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena. The friary amassed a large library of thousands of ancient manuscripts, as well as more than 50,000 more modern volumes.
When an Islamist insurgency hit Mosul in 2008 following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Dominicans smuggled their library to Bakhdida, a city populated primarily by Syriac Catholics, only 20 miles away.
Then in 2014, the Sunni Islamist group Islamic State seized Mosul in June. A month later Christians were effectively exiled from the city, and Islamic State continued to expand across Iraq's Nineveh province.
Fr. Michaeel collected some 1,300 manuscripts from the 14th to the 19th century, and put them in two large trucks in the early morning, transferring them to a secret location in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where they have been kept safe. They include not only Christian works, but manuscripts on the Quran, music, and grammar.
"We passed.........
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicnewsagency.com ...
You should have seen the shocked look on some kids on a college selection tour who said they were going to major in Art History. I told them that they would have the mission of saving Christian Art in Europe as the Muslims take over.
Genocide - Treatment of Christians in the ME.
We need to do what we did before Constantinople fell.
Go to ever monastery, convent, and Church in the Middle East and shuttle it far away from the Muslims.
This priest is a brave man, doing vital heritage work.
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