"The Associated Press reported on Monday that Islamic State fanatics have ravaged the Central Library of Mosul, the largest repository of learning in that ancient city. Militants smashed the library’s locks and overran its collections, removing thousands of volumes on philosophy, science, and law, along with books of poetry and children’s stories. Only Islamic texts were left behind.
“These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah,” one of the ISIS jihadists announced as the library’s holdings were emptied into sacks and loaded onto pickup trucks. “So they will be burned.”As Jeff Jacoby concludes in his fascinating piece in JWR, "Any brute can burn parchment, or ransack a library, or blow up a mosque, or bulldoze cultural treasures. But not even mighty armies can destroy the ideas they embody."
This echoes the story recounted in The Assassin Lotus about Ulug Beg, the enlightened 15th-century Muslim ruler of the central Asian city of Samarkand:
"When Ulug Beg built his hilltop observatory in the 1420’s, it was the biggest and best equipped in the world, with a colossal marble sextant hewn into the rock, a massive concave solar clock integrated with the sextant, and a scholars’ library consisting of some 15,000 books. A cutting-edge research facility, the Stanford or Scripps of its time.
Which is why it was torched and razed to the ground by the same fundamentalists who beheaded Ulug Beg. All that remains today is what was carved into the earth: the giant semicircular trench of the sextant, excavated in 1908.
A tall, white-marble plaque nearby displays the astronomer-king’s epitaph:
Religion disperses like a fog,
Kingdoms perish,
But the works of scholars remain for an eternity."
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