[A-librarian-at-every-table] 'Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On' from The

Sun Apr 13 10:13:19 EDT 2008

If you're looking for more information on what is below called the "Byat
al-Hikma" (sic), please note that there is a typo in the article.  "Bayt" is
a better transliteration of the Arabic word cognate to Hebrew "Bet"
(house).  Wikipedia's article on the Bayt al-Hikma is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom .

Ben

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Kathleen de la Peña McCook <
kmccook at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:

>
>
> In 2005 the American Library Association issued a
> resolution on the connection between the Iraq war and libraries,
> calling for a full withdrawal of troops and a redistribution of
> funding but the conversation never extended much further than the
> bullet points.
>
> The Nation.
>
>    Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On
>    by R.H. Lossin
>
>
> The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to
> keep track. But in this season of fifth-year anniversaries, one
> largely forgotten crime demands to be recalled, in part because it
> relates directly to the politics of memory itself. Five years ago
> this week, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National
> Library and Archives (INLA)--one of the oldest and most used in the
> world. In Arab countries the old expression was "Cairo writes, Beirut
> publishes, and Baghdad reads."
>
> American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who
> requested protection from the GI's were told, "We are soldiers, not
> policemen" or "our orders do not extend to protecting this
> [building]." American military orders did, however, extend to
> guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat,
> Saddam Hussein's secret police.
>
> The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically
> questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague
> Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of
> Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be
> spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.
>
> Despite the sack of a major cultural institution and the collapse of
> the society around it, the library struggles on, continuing a long
> tradition of resurrection from the ashes of war. The world's first
> library was located in Mosul, in Northern Iraq. It was built in the
> 7th century BCE and produced the first known catalog in history. In
> 1927 a British archeological team unearthed it and, for "purposes of
> preservation", carried off many of its artifacts--including the
> oldest known copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of
> world literature.
>
> Iraq's intellectual golden era came later and coincided with the
> Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258) whose capital was established at Baghdad.
> In 832, the construction of the Byat al-Hikma (House of Wisdom)
> established the new capital as an unrivaled center of scholarship and
> intellectual exchange.
>
> The tradition of  research there brought advances in astronomy,
> optics, physics and mathematics. The father of algebra, Al-
> Khawarizmii, labored among its scrolls. It was here that many of the
> Greek and Latin texts we accept as the foundation of Western thought
> were translated, catalogued and preserved. And it was from Baghdad
> that these works would eventually make their way to medieval Europe
> and help lift that continent from its benighted, post-Roman
> intellectual torpor.
>
> In 1258, the Mongols descended on Baghdad and emptied the libraries
> into the Tigris, ending the city's scholarly preeminence enjoyed for
> nearly 500 years. "Hence the legend developed," as one scholar wrote,
> "that the river ran black from the ink of the countless texts lost in
> this manner, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city's
> slaughtered inhabitants."
>
> But under the Ottoman Empire, the library recovered and carried on.
> And despite decades of repression and deprivation under Saddam,
> intellectual accomplishments were still regarded as a major aspect of
> Iraq's cultural identity.
>
> The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one.
> The current Director of Iraq's National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad
> Eskander, estimates that over three days, as many as "60 percent of
> the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as
> the bulk of the Ba'ath era documents.... [and] approximately 25
> percent of the book collections were looted or burned." Other Iraqi
> manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar
> fates.
>
> Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library.
> The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the
> Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a
> cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture.
>
> Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
> Authority (CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic
> funds necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq's educational and
> informational infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant
> for Culture for the Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the
> American Embassy in Baghdad, left his position in February of 2005,
> not having "the supplies of ready cash that could be used to acquire
> something as simple as bookshelves." His position was left empty.
>
> When John Agresto, the education czar of the CPA, asked for $1.2
> billion to make Iraqi universities viable centers of learning: he
> received $9 million. He asked USAID for 130,000 classroom desks, and
> received 8,000.
>
> So the NLA staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces
> of the old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to
> Baghdad's booksellers. In fact Al Mutanabi is the source of 95
> percent of the books purchased to replace the looted collection of
> Iraq's National Library and Archive. But Al Mutanabi was destroyed by
> a car bomb in March of 2007.
>
> In a speech to the Internet Librarian International conference in
> 2004, Dr. Eskander described the state of the INLA: "When I was
> officially appointed as the new DG, INLA faced several challenges. It
> was the most damaged cultural institution in the country. The
> building was in a ruinous state; there was no money, no water, no
> electricity, no papers, no pens, no furniture (apart [from] 50
> plastic chairs). The morale of employees [was] very low. Three
> departments out of 18 were half-functioning."
>
> Despite this state of near-total ruin, the budget awarded by the CPA
> for the INLA in 2004, was only $70,000.
>
> In addition to material and financial obstacles, Dr. Eskander has had
> to contend with the problems arising from the immaterial legacy of a
> totalitarian dictatorship. In sharp contrast to the de-Baathification
> of Iraqi society by the CPA, a purely negative process of removing
> ranking members of the party from civil service positions, the INLA
> has adopted a comprehensive approach to restructuring institutional
> relations.
>
> "I removed all corrupt and lazy elements from positions of
> responsibility, while promoting a number of qualified young female
> staff to higher positions...The culture of taking orders was
> dominant," Eskander said. "Staff members were unable to and sometimes
> afraid of taking initiative. I have encouraged them to be proactive
> and creative. The new culture has begun gradually but steadily to
> take root in the internal life of NLA. I radically changed the
> mechanisms of decision-making and implementation by democratizing
> them. Now, librarians and archivists elect their own representatives
> who will participate at the meetings of the council of managers,
> where decisions are made. These representatives can monitor all
> activities within NLA and meet the DG anytime they want."
>
> The INLA now provides transportation for all of its 425 employees (up
> from 95 and not counting a security staff of 36) despite the rising
> costs of private security. It houses a functional nursery in order to
> maintain its female staff. (American libraries, whose staff is 85
> percent female and whose directors are 45 percent male, could take a
> cue.)
>
> Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence,
> the city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab.
> The Czech government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With
> the exception of invaluable training sessions organized by private
> educational institutions such as Harvard University, American support
> has been limited to a relatively small number of individual scholars,
> a few dedicated nonprofit agencies, nominal USAID support and the
> cooperation of a handful of private corporations. In 2005 the
> American Library Association issued a resolution on the connection
> between the Iraq war and libraries, calling for a full withdrawal of
> troops and a redistribution of funding but the conversation never
> extended much further than the bullet points.
>
> The US State Department has created the Iraq Virtual Science Library,
> which provides access to a large number of health and science
> databases to institutions throughout the country. But Internet
> access, like electricity, is intermittent at best. Iraq is, after
> all, a largely collapsed society.
>
> Many other more promising projects have been abandoned or left in a
> state of limbo for lack of funding. Efforts at book donation have
> become ever more challenging as the security situation worsens and
> thus have largely stopped.
>
> The British National Library has provided recently published English-
> language social science texts and donated microfilm copies of its
> colonial administrative records from its last occupation of Iraq. But
> the replacement of physical documents largely ends here.
>
> It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians
> and their shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly
> costly dependence on proprietary databases for the state of Iraq's
> infrastructure. But the increasingly unstable position of American
> libraries is actually part of the same logic that produced that war.
> The disdain for cultural institutions does not stop at the border--
> bombs there, budget cuts here.
>
> That said, the lack of solidarity from the American community of
> librarians and scholars for their Iraqi counterparts is shameful.
> Rousseau suggested that empathy is the basis of language and
> communication.
>
> If the raison d'&ecirc;tre of the library profession is the
> preservation and dissemination of information, and thus the
> communication of ideas and the promotion of open discourse, then this
> question of empathy and solidarity should be the profession's guiding
> purpose. Books might seem like an afterthought for people facing
> violent death, poverty and shattered future, yet the library now
> receives 750 patrons a month. If there is any hope for stability and
> reconstruction in Iraq, a little more library solidarity is due.
>
>
>
> This article can be found on the web at:
>
> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/lossin
>
>
>
> Visit The Nation
> http://www.thenation.com/-------
>  Kathleen de la Peña McCook
> http://www.cas.usf.edu/lis/mccook
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