[wordup] Library Books are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad

[Adam Shand]

Because we burn libraries ...

From: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0415-07.htm

Published on Tuesday, April 15, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
Library Books, Letters and Priceless Documents are Set Ablaze in Final 
Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad
by Robert Fisk

So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the 
arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking 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historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq ­ were 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 library of Korans 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 of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi 
history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of 
handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, 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 troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on 
pilgrims, all 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 Koranic library, 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 Koranic library burning ­ flames 100 feet 
high were bursting from the windows ­ I raced to the offices of the 
occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. 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. I said 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 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, 
handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal 
photographs and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic 
newspapers going back to the early 1900s.

But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library 
where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the 
building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards 
and the concrete stairs that I climbed had been cracked.

The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or 
writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, 
standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same 
question: why?

So, as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me quote 
from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in 
the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in 
Istanbul or to the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty 
and who signed themselves "your slave". There was a request to protect a 
camel convoy of tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi 
(recommending Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a 
request for perfume and advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court 
of Sharif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is 
just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded," 
Ayashi says. "If you don't take our advice, then we have warned you." A 
touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.

Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and 
artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the 
opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz ­ soon to be Saudi 
Arabia ­ while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day 
Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who 
attacked his interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them but was 
restrained and later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of 
recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest 
morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government." 
This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history ­ all that is 
left of it, which fell into The Independent's hands as the mass of 
documents crackled in the immense heat of the ruins.

King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose staff are the 
authors of many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. 
His son Faisel became king of Iraq ­ Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad 
after the French threw him out of Damascus ­ and his brother Abdullah 
became the first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the 
grandfather of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.

For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the 
Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis 
Khan's grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, 
the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black 
ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd