Kareem Shaheen - World's oldest library reopens in Fez: 'You can hurt us, but you can't hurt the books'
The caretaker stares at
the wrought iron door and its four ancient locks with a gleam in his eyes.
Outside, the Moroccan sun shines down upon the ornate coloured tiles of
Khizanat al-Qarawiyyin, located in the old medina of Fez. This, it is
widely believed, is the oldest library in the world – and soon it will be open
to the general public again. “It was like healing
wounds,” says Aziza Chaouni, a Fez native and the architect tasked with
restoring the great library.
The iron door is found
along a corridor that once linked the library with the neighbouring Qarawiyyin
Mosque – the two centres of learning and cultural life in old Fez. Inside it
were kept the most prized tomes in the collection; works of such immense import
that each of the four locks had separate keys held with four different
individuals, all of whom had to be present for the door to be opened.
The restored library
boasts a new sewerage and underground canal system to drain away the moisture
that had threatened to destroy many of its prized manuscripts – plus an
elaborate lab to treat, preserve and digitise the oldest texts. The collection
of advanced machinery includes digital scanners that identify minuscule holes
in the ancient paper rolls, and a preservative machine which treats the
manuscripts with a liquid that moistens them enough to prevent cracking.
A special room with
strict security and temperature and humidity controls houses the most ancient
works. The most precious is a ninth-century copy of the Qur’an, written in
ornate Kufic script on camel skin. The must of old books
permeates the reading room, and the copies feel fragile and dusty, wearied by
years of disuse. Some are wrapped up to prevent them disintegrating in your
hands.
“The people who work
here jealously guard the books,” says one of the caretakers. “You can hurt us,
but you cannot hurt the books.”
The library’s
restoration comes at a time when extremists are rampaging the region’s
heritage. Across Syria and Iraq, the militants of the Islamic State have carried
out cultural atrocities that include ransacking
the great library of Mosul, burning thousands of manuscripts, bulldozing
ancient Assyrian cities like Nimrud
and Hatra in Iraq, blowing up the Temple
of Bel in Palmyra and sacking the oasis city’s museum, in addition to
destroying tombs and mausoleums of Shia and Christian saints.
Those troubles seem a
world away in Morocco, which managed to remain unscathed by the tumult that has
gripped the region and brought down venerable nation states. The king introduced reforms that
placated enough of the middle class without devolving too much power to the
Islamist-dominated parliament, and peace was largely restored after
a series of protests in early 2011.
In 2012, the ministry
of culture, which manages the Qarawiyyin library and university, asked Chaouni
to assess the library, and she was pleasantly surprised when her architecture
firm was awarded the contract, in a field traditionally seen as a man’s
province.
The Qarawiyyin library
was also founded by a woman. In the ninth century, Fatima al-Fihri, the
daughter of a wealthy merchant from Tunisia’s Kairouan, arrived in Fez and
began laying the groundwork for a complex that would include the library, the Qarawiyyin
Mosque, and Qarawiyyin
University, the oldest higher education institution in the world – with
alumni including the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, the great Muslim
historian Ibn Khaldun, and the Andalusian diplomat Leo Africanus… read more:
I don't think this
counts as the World's oldest library. If it has to have 'reopened', then it
hasn't been continuously functional. This is technically a 're-founding'. If, then, we are
counting libraries merely by their founding date and not by their running
dates, then we have to count historical libraries, like Alexandria, or even
older, the great libraries of ancient China or Egypt.
If we are going by oldest
and longest running, then the title of 'oldest library in the world' actually
goes to the library of St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai (Egypt), which was
built between 548 and 565, and hasn't closed since. The oldest
continuously operating library for academics and students is at one of the
colleges in Oxford. It has been open continuously since 1276.
Then there's the
problem of what counts as a library. European monasteries, some founded before
700, had 'collections' of books that were accessible to scholars, some old,
some hand-made copies of religious and philosophical texts. For example, the
Lindisfarne gospels date from around 715, and were by no means unique at the
time. Many of those collections continued to stay in the hands of monasteries well
into the late middle ages and beyond, without having the technical
classification as 'libraries'. There's also the
massive depositories of Buddhist texts, many thousands of years old, and the
early collections of christian texts in Africa.
Essentially, this is a
great project, and the library is obviously important and beautiful. But to
claim it's the oldest library in the world is false.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/19/books-world-oldest-library-fez-morocco
