Malian Islamists on the run from French troops just torched a famed library of Islamic learning. Paula Froelich has more:
[T]hese libraries were spectacular, containing thousands of ancient leather-bound books written in Arabic, Hebrew, African tribal languages, Turkish, and many other tongues, and covering topics like astronomy, poetry, music, politics, grammar, medicine, law, conflict resolution, and women’s rights. The oldest books were from the eleventh century, when the Salt Road trading was at its peak and international traders would converge on Timbuktu. The information in these tomes was still so salient that, as the crumbling pages of the books were being preserved, people from all over the world were still trying to translate and study them to see if there was some knowledge they could use today. …
There is more than a heavy dose of irony about the book burnings, especially since many of the books burned by Islamists were Korans, and worth millions of dollars. Why burn the books when selling them could’ve been so much more profitable and at least kept the artifacts intact?
Walter Russell Mead curses the cultural vandalism:
People sometimes talk about the war against radical Salafi jihad groups as a clash of civilizations. In reality, as the torching of the great library of Timbuktu, a world class repository of Islamic history, religious writing and culture, shows, this is a war against civilization being waged by barbarian know-nothings.
Dish coverage of the destruction from last fall here.
The Dish 