Mosul’s Library Without Books - The New Yorker
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I could smell the acrid soot a block away. The library at the University of Mosul, among the finest in the Middle East, once had a million books, historic maps, and old manuscripts. Some dated back centuries, even a millennium, Mohammed Jasim, the library’s director, told me. Among its prize acquisitions was a Quran from the ninth century, although the library also housed thousands of twenty-first-century volumes on science, philosophy, law, world history, literature, and the arts. Six hundred thousand books were in Arabic; many of the rest were in English. During the thirty-two months that the Islamic State ruled the city, the university campus, on tree-lined grounds near the Tigris River, was gradually closed down and then torched. Quite intentionally, the library was hardest hit. ISIS sought to kill the ideas within its walls—or at least the access to them.
Despite enduring dictators, an extremist rampage that reconfigured Iraq’s borders, and three long wars over the course of four decades, Iraqis are known for their intellectual curiosity and literacy. There’s a famous saying in the Middle East: “Books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon, and read in Iraq.” For centuries, private home libraries were considered a sign of class. After the University of Mosul was founded, in 1967, sixty of the city’s largest private libraries donated their historic collections to the new campus library, Jasim told me. Those volumes are all gone now, too.
ISIS had already destroyed Mosul’s central library, the other major resource center in Iraq’s second-largest city, which was once a cosmopolitan melting pot of disparate religions and ethnicities. Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, called it “the systematic destruction of heritage and the persecution of minorities that seeks to wipe out the cultural diversity that is the soul of the Iraqi people. Burning books is an attack on the culture, knowledge and memory.”