A group of students, library employees, and others are trying to protect the historic library of Alexandria from the current unrest in Egypt.Â
Ingrid D. Rowland provides some historical context at the blog of the New York Review of Books.
Located near the site of its ancient predecessor, in the heart of historical Alexandria, the remarkable Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new Library of Alexandria, which opened in 2002, has been uncomfortably close to the turmoil that now wracks Egypt, and especially Egypt’s cities. First a suicide bomber attacked one of Alexandria’s Coptic churches on New Year’s Eve, killing 21 Egyptian Christians and injuring a hundred (including several Muslims worshipping at the mosque across the street). Now, for the past week, tens of thousands of young Egyptians have taken to the city’s streets, calling for more freedom, more jobs, lower prices, and democracy, unfazed by a harsh government crackdown and episodes of violence in which some three dozen Alexandrians have been killed. So it was a great relief to read the message “To our friends around the world” from Ismail Serageldin, the director of the Library, who reports that when unrest broke out on Friday, a cordon of young people rushed to surround the Library complex (which includes conference halls and a planetarium) and protect it from vandalism.
Serageldin’s message specifies “young people” rather than “students” because not all of these guardian angels were enrolled at the University of Alexandria across the street; some were Library employees, some were demonstrators, some may simply have been neighbors for whom the Library has become an essential symbol of Egypt, or perhaps of civilization in general. In any event, the move to protect the Library—as with similar efforts by protesters in Cairo to protect the Egyptian Museum after a group of looters smashed display cases and destroyed two mummies—is not only a matter of guarding the books and other splendid collections housed beneath its circular roof: it is a matter of guarding an idea.
The Library of Alexandria has burned twice before, once, partially, when Julius Caesar made his landing in Egypt in 48 BCE, and again, with devastating effect, in late antiquity. The first burning was probably a mistake, the second the result of religious fanaticism, most probably the same fanaticism that killed the Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia in 415 CE for daring, as a woman, to profess philosophy. Hypatia’s murderers called themselves Christians, but their real creed was an ancient cult of destruction that precedes every known religion, every state, every political system. We pin that cult now on the Germanic tribe of Vandals who sacked Rome in the year 455, but we can read its violent traces just as clearly in prehistoric times. Blind rage cannot understand anything as complex or beautiful as Rome, or a library, or even a person, an animal, a book, a tree, a work of art—but blind rage can make these intricate systems stop, and the ability to make things stop has served many of our kind since time immemorial as a fine substitute for learning, experience, scientific method, artistic creation, philosophy. Destruction, too, can count as hard work.
The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina was erected to reverse that dark history, to reject destruction—even the destruction of millennia past—as final. The building, with its circular face, emerges from the earth like a rising sun (the design is by a Norwegian firm, Snøhetta, people who understand the sun); it faces a glorious bay that laps the ruins of the Ptolemies’ palace. The complex hosts scientific conferences, conferences on women, a massive collection of manuscripts, digital equipment, museums, collections of contemporary art, and a host of other activities; it means to recreate the spirit of ancient Alexandria, for many centuries perhaps the most cosmopolitan place on earth.
Read the rest here.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.