Rebuilding the Library of Alexandria some 1300 hundred years after its final destruction at the hands of its Islamic conquerors in a country where blasphemy against Islam is still a crime was always a fool’s errand. But it was a fool’s errand lavishly embraced by every collection of useful idiots from UNESCO to the National Library of France, which kicked in half a million books.
Most of the money was spent constructing a massive edifice housing only a fraction of the books that could be found in the Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress or the British Library– in a country with a lower literacy rate than much of the African continent. The Library was a Mubarak project and as the wonderful Arab Spring turns into the Islamic Winter, the mobs of Tahrir are coming for the library.
The Library of Alexandria 2.0 is hardly a beacon of culture and enlightenment, but its arts programs, feeble as they are, have already become a target for Egypt’s rising Islamists. There’s no room for ballet in a country where women are expected to cover themselves head to toe in black and walk behind a man. To learn its future, we need only go back to the words of Caliph Omar who declared that if the contents of the library accord with the Koran then they are redundant, if they contradict the Koran, then they are heretical and must be burned.
Ibn Khaldun, the Berber historiographer, whose statue stands in a Tunis now fallen to Islamic mobs, asked, “Where is the literature of the Persians? Their literature was destroyed by order of Omar when the Arabs conquered the country. And so the literature of the Chaldees, the Babylonians, and a literature still more ancient that of the Copts.”
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