"If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them. And if they are opposed to the Quran, destroy them!"

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Dec 28, 2011 at 13:35

hans Guggenheim wrote :

> but why did you decide to ignore the destruction of the Library of Alexandria ? because it was too far in the past or, possibly, not deliberate ?<

Unwittingly or not, you bring up an excellent example that has surprisingly much to do with Moslem actions !

After the Alexandrian war the library in Alexandria was reconstructed, replenished with books and it survived until the Arab conquest. What happened then is preserved in a well-known story told i.al. by the Syriac author Bar-Haebreus. The Arab general Amr ibn al-As confronted with a big library in Alexandria sends a letter to the Rightly-Guided Caliph Omar asking what to with it. And Omar answers "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if they are opposed to the Quran, destroy them!"

Now from the Islamic point of view this is quite a consistent and logical pattern of behavior, eloquently confirmed by many other examples to the same effect.

E.g. El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyati, better known as Leo Africanus, reveals in his "The history and description of Africa and the notable things contained therein " (translated by J. Pory , London 1600,v.1, p.166) that :

"For certaine it is that at the same time the Persians lost those letters which were peculiar unto their nation; and that all their books, by the commendement of the Mahumetan prelates, were burnt least their knowledge in natural philosophie or their idolatrous religion might moue them to contemne the precepts of Mahumet".

And al-Biruni in his "Chronology of ancient nations "(p.42) has the following story :

"Kutaiba ben Muslim had extinguished and ruined in every possible way all those who knew how to write and to read the Kwarizmi writing, who knew the history of the country and who studied their sciences . In consequence these things are involved in so much obscurity , that it is impossible to obtain an accurate knowledge of the history of the country since the time of Islam (not to speak of pre-Muhammedan times)."

In other words, as a Moslem you need a vacuum, an artificial space deprived of history and identity you have to create, to be able to easily fill it with Islam. But when Islam is finally there and takes roots, there is no room for anything else.

Yet demolishing libraries,burning books, intimidating and persecuting kafiri scholars are to my mind just symptoms of a larger and more fundamental pathological illness at the very heart of Islam- its deeply in-built solipsist and regressive tendency.

Islam with its totally unverifiable but the more grandiloquent claims can't stand, let alone spread, at all when you have a clear historical record and scholars ready to bring the inconvenient evidence to the public's attention. So Islam must attack and get rid of both and by getting rid of the books and the scholars "not in agreement with the Quran" Islam takes us forcibly back far in time - not even to the pre-Enlightenment Epoch, but much farther to the pre-rational era in Man's intellectual development.

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