[Plantagenet]

Centuries after the library in Alexandria was destroyed by the Muslim Armies of Caliph Omar and Rome and Athens fell to barbarians, one last great great library of antiquity remained in Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman Empire and then the Greco-Roman Byzantine Empire.

The date of destruction of this last great library of antiquity is well-established---the library was destroyed by Muslim Armies who conquered the city in 1453.


Muslim armies destroyed the last great library of antiquity in Constantinople in 1543

[Keith_McClary]

Your case for XXXX being the greatest US president in history is about as well supported ...

Just pointing out the unreliability of Wackypedia.

your claim that five medieval Arab historians each decided they would misrepresent history

I said no such thing.

in the books they wrote to make the Arabs look bad.

According to your Wackypedia, Gregory was a Syriac speaking Christian who wrote books (some in Arabic language) including a work called Makhtbhanuth Zabhne, Chronicon, in which he considers history from the Creation down to his own day.
Sounds like your kind of "history".

[Keith_McClary]

Centuries after the library in Alexandria was destroyed by the Muslim Armies of Caliph Omar and Rome and Athens fell to barbarians, one last great great library of antiquity remained in Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman Empire and then the Greco-Roman Byzantine Empire.

The date of destruction of this last great library of antiquity is well-established---the library was destroyed by Muslim Armies who conquered the city in 1453.

Wacky is much less certain about this than you. Why don't you pop over and help them out with their needed citations?

[dissident]

In this case Plantagenet is correct. Why all the politically correct revisionist BS? The cultural atrocities by invading Islamic armies centuries ago is well established fact. Islam is an extremely intolerant religion (all middle eastern monotheistic ones seem to have this trait including Christianity -- the current version is nothing as virulent as it was even 300 years ago) which explicitly prescribes the destruction of any art or literature which features images of people or animals as well as based on other criteria. Libraries are the first target of new order kooks as was the case of Hitler's Germany and the extensive book burning there. What happened at Alexandria and Constantinople was no different. Kafir thought cannot be tolerated. And they didn't just burn the books, they slaughtered a large number of people and then took thousands more into slavery.

[Keith_McClary]

well established fact

I have this silly notion that "well established facts" should be traceable to a source.

[Plantagenet]

In this case Plantagenet is correct.

Thank you. You are a gentleman and a scholar.

Why all the politically correct revisionist BS? The cultural atrocities by invading Islamic armies centuries ago is well established fact.

Some folks just can't comprehend that historical events happened that aren't consistent with their contemporary politically correct mindset.

[dissident]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 80440.html

This article should throw some cold water on efforts to make over these Sharia pits of depravity into something resembling western ones. They are nothing alike. While the west at least pretends to be about tolerance and openness to differing ideas and beliefs, Islam is all about intolerance and is trapped in a medieval timewarp.

[Keith_McClary]

In this case Plantagenet is correct.

Thank you. You are a gentleman and a scholar.

If you do a Google Scholar search for "library of alexandria" "caliph omar" you will see :

-Caliph Omar supposedly ordered
-Popular tradition credits its destruction
-the supposed burning of the library of Alexandria upon its capture by the Caliph Omar
- (according to the Christians) by Moslems in 641 ad
-Alternative theories on the destruction include a civil war in the 3rd century AD ([Cas02], p.47),
and destruction by Caliph Omar in the 7th
-Caliph Omar, sometimes blamed for destruction of what was left of the Library of Alexandria in 641 AD, supposedly responded to a question
-Gibbon discusses and dismisses the canard that burning down the Great Library might have been the work of Caliph Omar
-There is a much earlier apocryphal story of Caliph Omar ordering the destruction of what was left of the library of Alexandria in 638. The story is spurious (as the library did not exist ...

Some (apparently a small minority) academic writers do take it seriously. Believe what you like, but you can't say it's a "well established fact".

[Plantagenet]

Believe what you like, but you can't say it's a "well established fact".

Its about as well-documented as most things in the early historical record. Since there was no TV coverage or news papers, many of the events we think of as being "historic" were only written about much later. Eyewitness accounts of past historic events are rare (although there are glorious exceptions, like Julius Caeser's or Josephus's eyewitness accounts----but even those may be slanted or biased due to the self-interest of the authors). BUT there are some indisputable facts that do support the story that the library in Alexandria was destroyed by the invading Muslim army

1. Its a fact the library has been destroyed.
2. Its a fact that five separate Arab medieval historians report that it was destroyed by an invading Muslim army.
3. Its a fact that your own Google search showed that the reports of the five Arab historians blaming the Muslim army were likely preceeded by even earlier accounts blaming the Muslim army.
4. Its a fact that the argument that it was impossible for the library to have been been destroyed by the Muslim army during the Islamic jihad because it was damaged or destroyed earlier is spurious, because libraries can be rebuilt and reconstituted, as clearly occurred with the longest surviving great library of antiquity---the Imperial Library in Constantinople which was "destroyed" at least twice earlier but was reconstituted each time before it was finally destroyed by an invading Muslim Army in 1453.
5. Its a fact that the much smaller ancient library at St. Catherine's monastery at Mt. Sinai in Egypt survives to this day only because the monks produced a parchment letter they said Muhammad himself had sent them granting them his personal protection from being sacked by the Muslims --- I've been to St. Catherine's monastery and seen bits of the ancient library and a copy of Muhammad's letter displayed there with his handprint affixed so you know it was from Muhammad himself--- so I have a small amount of personal input to add to this story.


Muhammad's letter granting his personal protection to the library at St. Catherine's monastery in the Sinai.

-------------

Have a great day!

[dissident]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... BR9XiE-mok

In the above video you have a Salafist sheikh calling for the destruction of the Pyramids. You can't merely fob off this as the rantings of a nutbar. His religion prescribes such practices. The Pyramids are pagan abominations to be removed from the sight of Allah. Christians behaved this way too several centuries ago. For some reason Islamic societies have not moved on from this primitive, barbaric religious culture.

[Keith_McClary]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jBR9XiE-mok

In the above video you have a Salafist sheikh calling for the destruction of the Pyramids. You can't merely fob off this as the rantings of a nutbar. His religion prescribes such practices. The Pyramids are pagan abominations to be removed from the sight of Allah. Christians behaved this way too several centuries ago. For some reason Islamic societies have not moved on from this primitive, barbaric religious culture.

The interviewer, presumably a mainstream Muslim, seemed to regard him as a far out nutbar.

[Keith_McClary]

2. Its a fact that five separate Arab medieval historians report that it was destroyed by an invading Muslim army.

The most prominent, Gregory, wasn't an Arab (by language or ethnicity), although I'm not sure why you think their ethnicity or language matters.
These five "separate" guys were just repeating the "well established facts" of their day, and each other.

3. Its a fact that your own Google search showed that the reports of the five Arab historians blaming the Muslim army were likely preceeded by even earlier accounts blaming the Muslim army.

Gregory wrote a "history" all the way back to creation, presumably based on "earlier accounts". Granted, he was 15% closer to the creation that we are, so he must know more about it.

I would prefer to take account of what modern day historians think - they have learned a bit over the last 700 years and from scientific archaeology in the recent decades.

[Plantagenet]

I'm not sure why you think their ethnicity or language matters.

You are claiming the five Arabic speaking historians and scholars who record the destruction of the great library in Alexandria are just making things up or somehow have all got the story wrong. But it is highly unlikely that Arabs would make up stories for their fellow Arabs that would defame the heroes of the Arab Jihad, or that Arab scholars would be able to foist a phony story on their fellow Arab scholars concerning the history of the Arabs in the face of both co-existing oral traditions, older historical writings and surviving official documents of the caliphate in the governmental centers in Baghdad and also in Cairo.

I would prefer to take account of what modern day historians think - they have learned a bit over the last 700 years and from scientific archaeology in the recent decades.

Alexandria has largely sunk beneath the waves. While archeological divers have surveyed the submerged monuments and even retrieved some sculptures that date back to ancient Alexandria, they haven't discovered anything that disproves the historical documents written by medieval Arabic historians and scholars that attribute the final destruction of the Library of Alexandria to an order given by Caliph Omar in a fit of religious bigotry after the Arabic jihad had conquered Egypt.


Ancient sculpture found submerged offshore from modern Alexandria----perhaps this sculpture gazed on the final destruction of the ancient library in Alexandria ordered by the Muslim religious fanatic Caliph Omar.

[Subjectivist]

At last the couriers called Abdel Kader Haidara, a Timbuktu native who had amassed Mali’s most valuable private collection of manuscripts, and also oversaw an association of Timbuktu residents holding their own libraries of manuscripts. “Abdel Kader got on the phone, and he said to the hijackers, ‘Trust me on this, we will get you your money,’” says Diakité. After some consideration, the gunmen allowed the boats and their footlockers, containing 75,000 manuscripts, to continue. “And we paid them four days later,” says Diakité. “We knew we had more boats coming.”

Contemporary scholars consider Timbuktu’s Arabic-language manuscripts to be among the glories of the medieval Islamic world. Produced for the most part between the 13th and 17th centuries, when Timbuktu was a vibrant commercial and academic crossroads at the edge of the Sahara, the volumes include Korans, books of poetry, history and scholarly treatises. Fields of inquiry ranged from the religious traditions of Sufi saints to the development of mathematics and surveys of breakthroughs in Graeco-Roman and Islamic astronomy. Merchants traded the literary treasures in Timbuktu’s markets alongside slaves, gold and salt, and local families passed them down from one generation to the next. The works reveal Timbuktu to have been a center of scientific inquiry and religious tolerance, an intellectual hub that drew scholars from across the Islamic world.

At a time when Europe was just emerging from the Middle Ages, Timbuktu’s historians were chronicling the rise and fall of Saharan and Sudanese monarchs. Physicians documented therapeutic properties of desert plants, and ethicists debated the morality of polygamy and smoking tobacco. “These manuscripts show a multiethnic, multilayered community in which science and religion coexisted,” says Deborah Stolk of the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands, which has supported manuscript preservation in Timbuktu. The family collections, she adds, “are filled with works laden with gold and beautiful drawings. We’re still discovering what is there.”

The crisis in Timbuktu began in the spring of 2012, when rebels from the Tuareg tribe—who have long aspired to create an independent state in northern Mali—allied with Islamic militants. The joint force, armed with heavy weapons looted from the armories of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, overran the northern parts of the country and seized control of Timbuktu and other towns. The jihadists soon shoved aside the secular Tuaregs, declared sharia law and began attacking anything they perceived as haram—forbidden—according to their strict definitions of Islam. They banned singing and dancing, and forbade the celebration of Sufi Islamic festivals. They demolished 16 mausoleums of Timbuktu’s beloved Sufi saints and scholars, claiming that veneration of such figures was a sacrilege. Eventually the militants set their sights on the city’s ultimate symbols of open-mindedness and reasoned discourse: its manuscripts.

A network of activists was determined to thwart them. For five months, smugglers mounted a huge and secret operation whose full details are only now coming to light. The objective: to carry 350,000 manuscripts to safety in the government-held south. The treasures moved by road and by river, by day and by night, past checkpoints manned by armed Islamic police. Haidara and Diakité raised $1 million to finance the rescue, then arranged for safe storage once the manuscripts arrived in Bamako.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/R ... z2sI9f3YXG

I stumbled over this story and it jogged the memory that we were talking about this last year. More at the link.

[tristanojbacon]

I suppose that this is one of the many problems with history and the people who record it. Different people will have different views, and so can suppress whatever they like. The Germans destroyed thousands of records pertaining to Jewish achievements in their libraries during the 1930s and 1940s, for example.
Crazy people!

[Tanada]

For custodians of the ancient heritage of the Middle East and North Africa, the recent rise of Islamist extremist groups has posed a dire challenge. Since its seizure of the historic Iraqi city of Mosul in early 2014, Islamic State has pillaged and demolished mosques, shrines, churches and other sacred sites across the region. The group continues to launch “cultural cleansing” operations from Tikrit to Tripoli.

In this grim procession, there have been occasional victories for culture over extremism, like the recapture last month of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, which may now be restored to something of its previous glory. A less familiar case of cultural rescue features an unlikely hero: a 51-year-old book collector and librarian named Abdel Kader Haidara in the fabled city of Timbuktu, in the West African country of Mali.

The story begins in April 2012, when Mr. Haidara returned home from a business trip to learn that the weak Malian army had collapsed and that nearly 1,000 Islamist fighters from one of al Qaeda’s African affiliates, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had occupied his city. He encountered looters, gunfire and black flags flying from government buildings, and he feared that the city’s dozens of libraries and repositories—home to hundreds of thousands of rare Arabic manuscripts—would be pillaged.

The prizes in Mr. Haidara’s own private collection, housed in his Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, include a tiny, irregularly shaped Quran from the 12th century, written on parchment made from the dried skin of a fish and glittering with illuminated blue Arabic letters and droplets of gold. His collection also boasts many secular volumes: manuscripts about astronomy, poetry, mathematics, occult sciences and medicine, such as a 254-page volume on surgery and elixirs derived from birds, lizards and plants, written in Timbuktu in 1684. “Many of the manuscripts show that Islam is a religion of tolerance,” he told me.

Mr. Haidara knew that many of the works in the city’s repositories were ancient examples of the reasoned discourse and intellectual inquiry that the jihadists, with their intolerance and rigid views of Islam, wanted to destroy. The manuscripts, he thought, would inevitably become a target.

A few days after the jihadist occupation began, Mr. Haidara, who worked full time as a book restorer, archivist and fundraiser, met with his colleagues at the office of the Timbuktu library association, which he had formed 15 years earlier. “I think we need to take out the manuscripts from the big buildings and disperse them around the city to family houses,” he told them, as he recalled the conversation for me two years later. “We don’t want them finding the collections of manuscripts and stealing them or destroying them.”

Months earlier, the Ford Foundation office in Lagos, Nigeria, had given Mr. Haidara a $12,000 grant to study English at Oxford in the fall and winter of 2012. The money had been wired to a savings account. He emailed the foundation and asked for authorization to reallocate the funds to protect the manuscripts from the hands of Timbuktu’s occupiers. The money was released in three days. Mr. Haidara recruited his nephew, and they reached out to archivists, secretaries, Timbuktu tour guides and a half-dozen of Mr. Haidara’s relatives.

The result was a heist worthy of “Ocean’s Eleven.” They bought metal and wooden trunks at a rate of between 50 and 80 a day, made more containers out of oil barrels and located safe houses around the city and beyond. They organized a small army of packers who worked silently in the dark and arranged for the trunks to be carried by donkey to their hiding places.

Over the course of eight months, the operation came to involve hundreds of packers, drivers and couriers. They smuggled the manuscripts out of Timbuktu by road and by river, past jihadist checkpoints and, in government territory, suspicious Malian troops. By the time French troops invaded the north in January 2013, the radicals had managed to destroy only 4,000 of Timbuktu’s nearly 400,000 ancient manuscripts. “If we hadn’t acted,” Mr. Haidara told me later, “I’m almost 100% certain that many, many others would have been burned.”

Mr. Haidara was especially proud of rescuing one manuscript: a crumbling volume about conflict resolution between the kingdoms of Borno and Sokoto in what is now Nigeria, the work of a Sufi holy warrior and intellectual who had briefly ruled Timbuktu in the mid-19th century. This man, Mr. Haidara argued, was a jihadist in the original and best sense of the word: one who struggles against evil ideas, desires and anger in himself and subjugates them to reason and obedience to God’s commands. It was, he thought, a fitting rebuke to all that the militants stood for.

— Mr. Hammer is a former Newsweek foreign correspondent and the author, most recently, of “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu” (Simon & Schuster).

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-librari ... 1460729998

[Subjectivist]

This guy makes the Librarian of Alexandria seem like a total failure!