MOSUL, Iraq — The storied library of
Iraq’s Mosul University boasted a million titles
before Daesh extremists rampaged through it, toppling book shelves and burning
ancient texts.
اضافة اعلان
Now, almost five
years after their defeat, the war-battered northern metropolis is trying to
rebuild the pride of the city long known as a literature hub boasting countless
booksellers and archives guarding rare manuscripts.
Mohamed Younes,
technical director of the prestigious university library, recalls the carnage
he witnessed after
Mosul was recaptured from Daesh in mid-2017 following long
and grueling street battles.
“When we came
back, we saw... the books pulled from the shelves, thrown on the ground and
burned,” he said.
Thousands of
texts on philosophy and law, science, and poetry which in some way contradicted
the
Daesh’s extremist world view had gone up in flames.
Some of the most
valuable titles were sold on the black market.
“Before, we had
more than a million titles, some of which couldn’t be found in any other
university in Iraq,” said Younes.
When the
extremists were first at the gates of the city, he said, “we were only able to
move the rare books and a number of foreign periodicals”.
With Daesh’s
brutal takeover of Mosul, 85 percent of the collection was lost.
Before Daesh,
Mosul University was “the mother of all books,” said former student Tarek
Attiya, 34, who is now enrolled at Tikrit university.
“There is a huge
difference between what used to be and the situation after IS (Daesh),” he
said.
Refurbished building
Now there is a revival going on to, with the help of donations, slowly
line the library shelves with books again.
The library
building, refurbished with financing from a
UN agency, is set to reopen this
month. Four floors high with a sleek glass exterior, it will have an initial
32,000 books.
It will also
feature a digital trove of e-books, with a view to eventually rebuilding a
million-strong collection.
Ahead of the
opening, the books have been housed in the narrow premises of the university’s
engineering faculty where shelves are overflowing and titles are stacked on
every available surface.
Significant
donations from Arab and international universities have been received to
“enable the revival of the library,” said the director.
Renowned figures
in Mosul and across Iraq have also contributed by “dipping into their personal”
collections, he added.
The northern
metropolis of Mosul has historically been a hub for merchants and aristocrats,
with a rich cultural and intellectual life.
A commercial
crossroad of the
Middle East, Mosul was able to preserve thousands of rare and
ancient works, notably religious texts.
Iraq’s first
printing press was operating in Mosul in the second half of the 19th century.
Appetite for reading
Signs of Mosul’s fledgling cultural revival have begun to take root — at
least where there was anything left to save.
The library of
the Waqf, the state body that manages Islamic endowments, once contained
manuscripts dating back 400 years, said its head, Ahmed Abd Ahmed.
But, he added
sadly, “they have all disappeared”.
Elsewhere in the
city, Al-Nujaifi street, historically lined with booksellers, still bears the
scars of destruction wrought by the jihadists.
Many shops are
abandoned, and mounds of rubble lay under old stone arches — but a handful of
shopkeepers have reopened their doors after paying out of pocket for
restoration work.
Mosul’s central
public library — which was founded a century ago last year, and had boasted
more than 120,000 titles — reopened its doors in late 2019, after restoration.
“We lost 2,350
books on literature, sociology or religion,” said its director Jamal Al-Abd
Rabbo.
But he added that
public donations and purchases had allowed him to rebuild the collection up to
132,000 titles.
Old leather-bound
books with worn spines and creased pages still line the library’s shelves.
Crucially, the public’s
appetite for literature remains unbroken, he said, and “some of our visitors
come daily, for an hour or two, to read”.
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