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Islamic Library Burned to the Ground [Fisk ALERT]
ArabNews - Saudi Arabia ^ | 4-15-03 | Robert Fisk

Posted on 04/14/2003 2:40:24 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer

BAGHDAD, 15 April 2003 — So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives — a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents including the old royal archives of Iraq — were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the Islamic Library of Qur’ans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. I saw the looters.

One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have been no more than 10 years old. Amid the ashes of hundreds of years of Iraqi history, I found just one file blowing in the wind outside: Pages and pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sherif Hussein of Makkah — who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia — and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.

And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for Ottoman troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all of them in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq’s written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Qur’anic library of the ministry, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased.

Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed? When I caught sight of the Qur’anic library burning — there were flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows — I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines’ civil affairs bureau, to report what I had seen. An officer shouted to a colleague that “this guy says some Biblical (sic) library is on fire.” I gave the map location, the precise name — in Arabic and English — of the fire, I said that the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene — and the flames were now shooting 200 feet into the air.

There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the caliphate, but even the dark years of the country’s modern history, hand-written accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, an entire library of Western newspapers — bound volumes of the Financial Times were lying on the pavement — and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; United Kingdom; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: archives; fallofbaghdad; fisk; godsgravesglyphs; iraqhistory; libraries; looting; order; purge; socialist; vermin; whiner
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Comment #41 Removed by Moderator

To: amused
The poor and uneducated people in American cities would destroy Government buildings if they could get away with it.

I live is Washington DC and was wondering if the museums on the mall would be pass up by thieves (Ali-Baba's) if all events were the same.

Well, I don’t think so! The Hope Diamond would be the first item to go.

I believe evil people are the same all over the world now because of air travel and communications.

Good Luck...Hmmmmm...I wonder....

45.52 carats The Hope Diamond--the world's largest deep blue diamond--is more than a billion years old. It formed deep within the Earth and was carried by a volcanic eruption to the surface in what is now India. Since the Hope Diamond was found in the early 1600s, it has crossed oceans and continents and passed from kings to commoners.

It has been stolen and recovered, sold and resold, cut and recut. Through it all, the diamond's value increased. In 1958, Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Museum, and it now belongs to the people of the United States.

Visit the Museum to learn more about the dramatic interactions between people and this diamond, and about its natural history. Visit the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals which opened in September, 1997.

42 posted on 04/14/2003 3:43:50 PM PDT by Major_Risktaker ("No Risk, No Reward")
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Comment #43 Removed by Moderator

To: calico joe
As with the National Antiquities Museum, this library looting and burning, may also be the work of old regime Iraqi officials. No one saw anybody ‘looting’ the museum, as they did with everyother place that was looted, it was found looted. I doubt that any of the average Iraqi people did it, but rather those who were aware of the value contained there in, and wanted to make it look like common looting.
44 posted on 04/14/2003 4:27:30 PM PDT by thatcher
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To: thatcher
No one saw anybody ‘looting’ the museum

I was wondering if the staff decided it was a good time to make a few bucks in the antiquities market. As someone pointed out, the staff had months to pack up the valuables and put them in a safe place. Curious they didn't do it.

In "normal" wars the victors burn down the losers' towns, steal their valuables and rape their women. When it's an American war the loser's do all of the above, and the victors catch hell for not stopping them. If it wan't so sad, it would be funny.

45 posted on 04/14/2003 4:38:03 PM PDT by stop_fascism
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
Fisk may have his political biases, but the identity of the author aside, it's quite sad news to read that these materials and relics have been destroyed. Things like this do happen in war, and it's a prime example of why war is horrible. The other posters are right--it's not the US's fault, or anyone else's, really--the books got caught in the crossfire, and when war is being fought all around, cultural relics aren't foremost on the combatants' minds. It's a fact of life that relics are often lost in wars; it's happened before.

If anything good is to come out of this, I hope that events like this inspire curators and scholars and librarians the world over to review the events and try to draw up some more effective procedures to follow when war seems to be on the horizon to get these kinds of materials to safe shelter.

46 posted on 04/14/2003 4:41:25 PM PDT by Hoppean
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To: Blue Screen of Death
I thought all of the American soldiers had been informed that Saddam had plastic surgery and now looks exactly like Robert Fisk. They should shoot on sight. Didn't every one get the memo?

LOL

47 posted on 04/14/2003 4:46:10 PM PDT by ladyjane
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
You mean that 1400 years of the records of one oppresive, murderous regime after another has gone up in smoke? That sounds liberating to me as if the burden of centuries of repression is lifted from one's shoulders. Too bad it couldn't have been done symbolically, but maybe this is the only way to do it.
48 posted on 04/14/2003 4:51:22 PM PDT by stripes1776
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To: happydogdesign
That's great!
49 posted on 04/14/2003 4:52:30 PM PDT by dennisw
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
You know... I didn't think there was anything in the world that could cause me to rationalize the burning of a library.

But the image of Fisk silhouetted against the flames, howling dismally like a kicked dog over the loss of the sacred written treasures of his beloved Islam, is delectable enough to make me think it *might* be something for which it *would* be worth burning a library...

50 posted on 04/14/2003 4:55:29 PM PDT by fire_eye
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To: Mark17
Islamic Library Burned to the Ground

Waste of good toilet paper.

51 posted on 04/14/2003 6:37:46 PM PDT by ambrose
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To: elbucko
Bump #14.
52 posted on 04/14/2003 6:42:32 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer (Peace through Strength)
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To: dennisw
The American Library Association is really going to be ticked off. I will have to lurk over at the leftier leaning library blogs to see will be said.
53 posted on 04/14/2003 6:56:02 PM PDT by LauraJean (Fukai please pass the squid sauce)
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To: stripes1776
You mean that 1400 years of the records of one oppresive, murderous regime after another has gone up in smoke? That sounds liberating to me as if the burden of centuries of repression is lifted from one's shoulders. Too bad it couldn't have been done symbolically, but maybe this is the only way to do it.

If you really mean that, now I know what Fisk meant when he made reference to "Year Zero." Most of the regimes in human history have been "oppressive and murderous," by American standards. Yet, if we burned all the records and writings from all those regimes, there really would be no written history or museums at all. It'd be as if there had been no earth, no men, no events prior to 1776 (Year Zero). Isn't that like Orwell's "memory hole" in his book _1984_?

I don't mean to come down on you, since I think you didn't really strenuously mean it, but I'm not sure I'd feel free if I knew that I wouldn't even be taught in school about "unfree" regimes of the past, or if I wanted to be a scholar or historian, I wouldn't be able to go to some archives and read those old documents for my research.

54 posted on 04/14/2003 7:21:11 PM PDT by Hoppean
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To: Hoppean
I don't mean to come down on you, since I think you didn't really strenuously mean it, but I'm not sure I'd feel free

Yes, you're right that I didn't mean it strenuously. I wasn't advocating the destruction of libraries with ancient texts in them. As I said it's too bad this couldn't be done symbolically, like toppling statues and portraits of a brutal tyrrant.

But the slums of Baghdad are worse than Haiti and Calcutta. I was trying to get inside the head of one of these slum dwellers who might have had a friend whose tongue was cut out of his mouth and then the body dropped off in the neighborhood to bleed to death in a pool of blood. It was probably a liberating moment in their minds when they set fire to a library.

I am not condoning it. But I think the rage is understandable. I don't think some one from the slums is interested in sitting down to tea and discussing the niceties of culture. For them it is a moment of rage and revenge through destruction. Not nice, but history is full of things that are not nice.

55 posted on 04/14/2003 7:57:27 PM PDT by stripes1776
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To: stripes1776
But the slums of Baghdad are worse than Haiti and Calcutta. I was trying to get inside the head of one of these slum dwellers who might have had a friend whose tongue was cut out of his mouth and then the body dropped off in the neighborhood to bleed to death in a pool of blood. It was probably a liberating moment in their minds when they set fire to a library.

That's true--that sort of rebellion happens in a lot of places. I didn't know about the comparison to Haiti and Calcutta--was it always that way, or just worsened by the sanctions over the last decade? I'd heard that before Gulf War I broke out a decade ago, the Iraqis were modernizing and on the path to breaking out of Third World status.

One of the things that surprised me watching these news reports from Iraq was how many of the Iraqis speak English, and someone told me when I asked about it that Saddam had invested a lot of money in education for the Iraqis (free college, etc.). Again, that probably changed after the sanctions started and services started dropping off in quality over the years.

56 posted on 04/14/2003 8:32:45 PM PDT by Hoppean
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To: Hoppean
I'd heard that before Gulf War I broke out a decade ago, the Iraqis were modernizing and on the path to breaking out of Third World status.

If you were an Arab Sunni Muslim and supported the Ba'ath socialist party, you did well in Saddam's regime and had acces to education. The slums are composed mostly of Shiite Muslims.

Most of the money went into Saddam's pocket, hence 43 palaces around the country. The elaborate ones with 15-ft chandeliers, marble floors, and gold toilets. He stashed billions outside the country in foreign bank accounts. I have seen estimates of $30 billion. Anyway, there is an attempt to track down this money and return it to Iraq to rebuild the country.

57 posted on 04/14/2003 8:56:39 PM PDT by stripes1776
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To: RaceBannon
Agree with comment 12! I use to work in a rare book library and hate to see such destruction, but if people care so little about their own heritage, why should we?
58 posted on 04/15/2003 4:15:36 PM PDT by Prince Hal
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To: MosesKnows
I agree with you. This is a terrible, horrible loss. These were the first writings of MANKIND, for the love of God!
59 posted on 04/15/2003 10:21:43 PM PDT by Marie (If bad spelling is an indicator of a brilliant mind, then I'm a total genious.)
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