Matthew Battles

First, know your customer. "When scholars and persons high social position [the old patrons of the library, in both senses of the word] come to a library, they have confidence enough... Modest men in the humbler walks of life, and well-trained boys and girls, need encouragement before they become ready to say freely what they want." In the later episodes in the life of Green's librarian, however, it becomes clear that the problem isn't one of timidity but one of wisdom. It isn't that they can't utter what they want; in truth, they don't know what they need. And it's up to the librarian to remedy the deficiency.

[p149-150]

To Riedlmayer, too, the nationalists' motive is all too apparent. "Throughout Bosnia", he has written, "libraries, archives, museums and cultural institutions have been targeted for destruction, in an attempt to eliminate the material evidence - books, documents and works of art - that could remind future generations that people of different ethnic and religious traditions once shared a common heritage..." Riedlmayer has written eloquently about Convivencia, the animating notion of the culture of Moorish Spain, in which the traditions of Muslims, Jews, and Christians were understood to contribute to a civilization greater than the sum of its parts. Similar notions, Riedlmayer argues, once animated the intellectual and cultural life of the Balkans in the Ottoman era. But the Serb nationalists who besieged Sarajevo in August 1922 could not abide so direct a contradiction of the cherished ideals of ethnic purity. "What's odd in all this," Riedlmayer has written, "is the reversal of perspectives - the 'ethnic cleansers' show a keen understanding of cultural and religious factors: these are the main criteria on which they select their targets." Their attempted destruction of Bosnian libraries is cruelly ironic, because it confirms Western prejudices about the intractable mutual hatreds prevalent in the Balkans, even as it erases the very evidence of its contradiction: the rich and varied products of a millennium of cultural and intellectual conviviality in the region. Western peacekeepers, aid workers, and bureaucrats, meanwhile, fail to acknowledge cultural destruction for the harbinger of genocide that it is.

[p188-189]

The greatest efflorescence of libraries came with the rise of Islam. Perhaps ironically, Muhammad had prized his own illiteracy, for the proof it gave of his authentic witness : he could not have read and received the influence of any other Scripture, nor could he have written Allah's words with his own hand. Even miraculous writing – like Yahweh's decalogical gift to Moses on Mount Sinai – would have failed to light the spark of belief among the skeptical Arabs. In al-An'am 6:7.9, Allah reminds Muhammad, « Had we sent down unto thee (actual) writing upon parchment, so that they could feel it with their hands, those who disbelieve would have said : This is naught else than mere magic. » Instead, Allah instructs his prophet to command his followers to copy out the Koran so that they might comme to believe it for themselves.

[p61]

Over coffee one afternoon in the summer of 2001, Andras reminded me of another way to burn books, explained to him by a colleague who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In the winter, the scholar and his wife ran out of firewood, and so began to burn their books for heat and cooking."This forces one to think critically," Andras remembered his friend saying. "One must prioritize. First, you burn old college textbooks, which you haven't read in thirty years. Then there are the duplicates. But eventually, you're forced to make tougher choices. Who burns today: Dostoevsky or Proust ?"

[p190-191]