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And then the Taliban burned my books again." Finally, during the last raid on his shop, while the police were piling his books on the pyre, Shah Muhammad abandoned his meek behaviour and went to see the minister of Culture. "You destroy my books," he told him, "maybe you'll destroy me, but there is something you'll never destroy." The minister asked what that might be. "The history of Afghanistan," Shah Muhammad answered. Miraculously, he was spared.
In the United States, attempts to curtail the reading of the black population date from the earliest days of slavery. In order to prevent slaves from rebelling, it was essential that they remain illiterate. If slaves learned to read, it was argued, they would become informed of political, philosophical and religious arguments in favour of abolition, and rise against their masters. Therefore, slaves who learned to read, even the Bible, were often punished with death; it was assumed that, while conversion of the slaves was "convenient,"282 knowledge of the Scriptures was to be acquired only through the eyes of their white masters. The black teacher Booker T. Washington noted that in his childhood "the great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died. With this end in view, men and women who were fifty and seventy-five years old, would be found in night- schools."283
Not all whites believed that slaves learning to read would necessarily lead to an uprising; there were those who thought that, if they learned to read the Bible, they would become, on the contrary, meek and obedient
BELOW: Portrait of Booker T. Washington.
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OPPOSITE: A postcard showing the Cossitt Library in Memphis.
servants. Even after the American Bible Society began to distribute Bibles to freed slaves in the late 1860s, there were those among free-thinking white educators who believed that education must serve not as a means to intellectual freedom, but "as an essential tool to moderate the threat arising from 'an inferior, dangerous addition to the republic.'"284
In the American South, libraries were not open to the black population until the early twentieth century. The first one recorded was the Cossitt Library in Memphis, Tennessee, which agreed to provide the LeMoyne Institute, a school for black children, with a librarian and a collection of books.285 In the Northern states, where public libraries had opened their doors to black readers a few years earlier, the fear of treading forbidden territory was still present as late as the 1950s. The young James Baldwin remembered standing at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, admiring "the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library." The building seemed to him so vast that he had never yet dared enter it; he was terrified of losing himself in a maze of corridors and marble steps, and never finding the books he wanted. "And then everyone," he
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wrote, as if observing himself from the distance of many years, "all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to so many books, and they would look at him with pity."286
Oblivion can be forced on libraries in many ways—by the happenstances of war, or of displacement. In 1945, shortly before the end of the Second World War, a Russian officer discovered in an abandoned German train station a number of open crates overflowing with Russian books and papers that the Nazis had looted. This, according to the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, was all that was left of the celebrated Turgeniev Library, which the author of Fathers and Sons had founded in Paris in 1875 for the benefit of emigre students, and which the novelist Nina Berberova called "the greatest Russian library in exile."287 And even those volumes have today vanished.
The Yiddish poet Rachel Korn, who spent most of her life, as she described it, "shipwrecked in Canada," said that, after being exiled from her village in East Galicia, she felt like someone "being forced to leave your belongings on a sinking ship." But she resisted what seemed to her "enforced oblivion." "When you have been forced to leave your country," she said, "every library is lost, except the ones you remember. And even those, you have to reread in your mind, over and over again, so that the pages don't keep falling out." Her daughter explained how, shortly after their arrival in Montreal, Korn had obliged her, every night, to go through the poems by Pushkin, by Akhmatova, by Mandelstam, that she had learned by heart, as if they were bedtime prayers. "Sometimes she corrected us and sometimes I corrected her." Those remembered texts were the only library that counted for her in exile.288
Sometimes a library is wilfully allowed to vanish. In April 2003, the Anglo-American army stood by while the National Archives, the Archaeological Museum and the National Library of Baghdad were ransacked and looted. In a few hours, much of the earliest recorded history of humankind was lost to oblivion. The first surviving examples of writing, dating from six thousand years ago; medieval chronicles that had escaped the pillage of Saddam Hussein's henchmen; numerous volumes of the exquisite collection of Korans kept at the Ministry of Religious Endowment—all disappeared, probably forever.289 Lost are the manuscripts lovingly penned by the illustrious Arab calligraphers, for
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The looting of the National Library and State Archives of Baghdad.
whom the beauty of the script had to mirror the beauty of the contents. Vanished are collections of tales like those of the Arabian Nights, which the tenth-century Iraqi book dealer Ibn al-Nadim called evening stories because one was not supposed to waste the hours of the day reading trivial entertainment.290 The official documents that chronicled Baghdad's Ottoman rulers have joined the ashes of their masters. Gone, finally, are the books that survived the Mongol conquest of 1258, when the invading army threw the contents of the libraries into the Tigris to build a bridge of paper that turned the waters black with ink.291 No one will ever again follow the years of correspondence that meticulously described dangerous voyages from the past and wonderful cities caught in time. And no one will again consult, in these particular copies, great reference works such as Dawn for the Night-Blind, by the fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar al-Qalqashandi, who, in one of the fourteen volumes, explained in detail how each of the letters of Arabic script should be formed, since he believed that what was written would never be forgotten.292
Though a good number of objects were returned to Iraq in the months following the looting, by the end of 2004 a large proportion of the stolen books, documents and artifacts had not been recovered, in spite of the efforts of Interpol, unesco, icom (International Council of Museums) and several cultural agencies around the world. And many irreplaceable texts and objects were destroyed. "In all, what was recovered makes up less than 50 percent of what was stolen," declared Dr. Donny George, director of the Baghdad Archeological Museum. "More than half of the looted material is still missing, which is a great loss for Iraq and for all of humanity."293
Luciano Canfora has argued the importance of documenting not only the history of the disappearance of libraries and books, but the history of the awareness of their disappearance.294 He points out, for example, that in the first century B.C. Diodorus Siculus, commenting on the Greek philosopher Theopompus's chronicles of the campaigns of Philip of Macedon, noted that the entire book consisted of fifty-eight volumes of which "unfortunately, five are no longer to be found." Canfora explains that since Diodorus lived most of his life in Sicily, in regretting the loss of Theopompus's five volumes he meant that they were absent from the local collections, probably from the historical library of Taormina. Eight