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The Diary
"A report in Tuesday's edition of Al-Quds Al-Arabi mentioned the burning by arson (?) of the Library of the Museum in Nasiriyah, with a loss of ca. 4000 volumes. Juan Cole's blog repeats this story this morning "...a library in Nassiriyah containing some 4,000 volumes was set on fire by unknown persons..." , citing a report in Corriere della Sera. Al-Mashriq reports: "An anonymous official yesterday said unknown people burned a library in Nasiriya which contained about 4,000 invaluable books. Director of Relics Abdul Ameer al-Hamadani said unknown people set fire to the library which was completely destroyed. 'The library contains 3,900 invaluable books some of which are classified as archaeological,' said al-Hamadani." Chuck Jones, IraqCrisis Moderator 26/04/2004: 60% of Documentation for Modern Iraqi History Lost " Ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP have an article on the impact of the looting last April after the fall of the regime on the documentation for modern Iraqi history. The article maintains that 60% of the documents are gone, most of them burned. The loss is especially extensive for the period of the constitutional monarcy, 1921-1958, a period during which there were at least sometimes fairly open parliamentary elections. I hope to find or translate the entire article at some point. Note that US conservatives like Charles Krauthammer attempted to maintain last summer that the looting and loss of Iraqi history had been exaggerated. As a historian of Iraq myself, I can't tell you how it hits me in the gut to have so much of the documentation gone. It means that we will never be able to recover the indigenous side of many developments now known only from the British archives, with their colonial biases." From Juan Cole. 20/03/2004: Aches and ashes "And as he was sleeping, one of the priests seemed to say to him that the one way to recovery for the man and the one remedy for the impending troubles was if he, burning the books of Epicurus, and kneading the ashes of those godless and impious and effeminizing letters with moist wax, and making an application of this, should bind about the stomach and all the chest with bandages." (Notes on Book Burning by Arthur Stanley Pease). And against a stubborn malaria, the Bencao kangmu (1596) tells us to burn the full next year calendar (nothing to do with the Leo Loewenthal's "Calibans Kalender") at midday during the feast of the dragon-boats, make a paste then pills the size of peppercorns; eat fifty of these pills early every morning with Cassytha water. Paper (or ink) was such an acknowledged remedy in ancient China that burning and swallowing the page of the formula happened to appear an expeditious cure in case of urgency. 15/03/2004: Men at war "When coalition forces captured Baghdad, they took control of some 80 percent of the former Iraqi regime's documents--hundreds of millions of pieces of paper--and moved them to an undisclosed location outside Iraq. The only people who have been allowed to look at them are members of the Iraqi Survey Group, the U.S. intelligence unit seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." How accurate is this statement? asks Michael Palmer of San Jose State University SLIS. - He's right to ask : if true, this stampeding of a country is sheer obscenity. - Oh my God ! I thought that War was something noble if unpleasant. What has it left then? 20/01/2004: Endgame During centuries "bibliotheca" was a library's catalogue. Today we see that "catalogue" is the solid oak piece of furniture in the drawers of which the cards were stored, each one being the papers of a book.Today's human beings can buy these cabinets for 200 dollars to get rid of their CDs in. And what about the cards ? They were discarded, pulped on the sly. 10/01/2004: Saddam's secret hoard, continued Three million dollars are now necessary for the treatment of the hoard. My little finger tells me that there will be a long time before the Baghdadis see these books back. History is poorly imaginative: the Nazi police also collected Judaica and Hebraica under the orders of Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler. Then the Omgus came, with expert librarians in their retinue. Who couldn't go back their hands empty (Cf. Livres en feu, page 235). 30/01/2004: Baghdad, best bargain Harun al-Rashid probably didn't go himself, but there was a huge suq al-kuttub every Friday morning in Baghdad during his time. It's still there and the same day, in Mutanabi street. Hundred of thousands of books are available and cheap. Torn and scratched by its continuous stay on the pavement, look at this heavy dictionary: 40 years old, 12 pounds, 9 dollars. Haggle shamelessly: it still bears the stamps of the public library where it was stolen last year. http://www.newsday.com/features/ny-p2page33612870jan07,0,3358220.story?coll=ny-features-headlines 12/01/2004: Auto-da-fés have no end Nehru used to say that Pune (Poona) was « the Oxford and Cambridge of India ». That's where a library of 30 000 ancient manuscripts was savagely burnt by a « Sambhaji Brigade », sent by the ultras of « Maratha Seva Sangh » sect. As for Salman Rushdie in Tehran or Haydar Haydar in Cairo, they didn't like a book by James W. Laine (Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India), who apparently came to Pune for his research. Oxford University Press had awkwardly withdrawn the book from the market, thus opening the door to all conjurings. http://www.museum-security.org http://web.mid-day.com/news/city/2004/january/73054.htm http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-385489,curpg-1.cms http://cities.navhindtimes.com/stories.php?part=news&Story_ID=01084 http://kitabkhana.blogspot.com/ 10/01/2004: Saddam's secret hoard of Jewish manuscripts Military personnel discovered the cache while searching for weapons of mass destruction in the headquarters of Saddam's secret police force in Baghdad. It has now been transferred for conservation to Washington, DC. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11494 |
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