c. 584–644 CE · caliph
'Umar ibn al-Khattab
Second caliph, from 634 to 644, under whom Syria, Iraq and Egypt were conquered. The words put in his mouth about the Library's books ("if they agree with the Book of God they are unnecessary; if they disagree, undesirable") belong to a 13th-century story.
Their life and work
The early Arabic historians of the conquest of Egypt, Ibn Abd al-Hakam and al-Baladhuri, both of the ninth century, tell of the campaign and the treaty with no word of books. The story appears first in a passing remark of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, who was in Egypt in 1203, about the library that 'Amr, he says, burned with 'Umar's permission. Ibn al-Qifti, a generation later, tells it at length. Bernard Lewis argued that Saladin's own breaking up of the Fatimid libraries gave such a story a use. Legend: told story
Modern scholars, from Butler in 1902 to Bernard Lewis, read it as a legend: no source within five centuries of 642 has it, and the order put in his mouth is told of books in Persia too.
Our device: No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
Moments
- 641–642 CE · The Arab conquest, and the later story of the caliph's order Known: attested
- c. 1200 CE · A story first told about 1200: the caliph's order Legend: told story
In the show
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Sources (6)
- B. Lewis, "The Arab Destruction of the Library of Alexandria: Anatomy of a Myth", in El-Abbadi and Fathallah (eds.), What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria? (Leiden, 2008) 213–217
- D. Delia, "From Romance to Rhetoric: The Alexandrian Library in Classical and Islamic Traditions", American Historical Review 97.5 (1992) 1449–1467
- Ibn al-Qifti, History of the Learned 354–356 Lippert
- Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, Account of Egypt on the column of Alexandria
- A. J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion (Oxford, 1902; 2nd ed. P. M. Fraser, 1978) (opens in a new tab)
- B. Lewis, "The Vanished Library", letter in The New York Review of Books, 27 September 1990