Book Burning
May 10th, 2008“We recall today with shame that 75 years ago - not just here in Berlin, but in all of Germany - tens of thousands applauded and cheered as the books of Erich Kaestner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Kurt Tucholsky and many others were thrown into the fire by the Nazis” said today the German President, Horst Koehler, in a speech at Berlin’s Academy of Arts, on the occasion of (Bücherverbrennung) “book burning” of the Nazi regime.
The so-called “degenerate” books, were burning on May, 10,1933, under Hitler’s dictatorship. It started from the capital of the third Reich, Berlin, with 20,000 books and went on in other German cities; the ordered was called (Säuberung) or “cleansing”. The Nazis burnt books with “non-German” ideas. Books written by Freud, Einstein, Thomas Mann, Jack London, H.G. Wells and many others go up in flames as they give the Nazi salute.
The target of this historically symbolic action was the suppression of free thoughts and ideas. The action was a tactic of Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda with the target of brainwashing a whole nation. The works of leading German writers such as Berthold Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Kerr were consigned to flames. The promotion of “Aryan” culture and the suppression of other forms of artistic production was yet another Nazi effort to “purify” Germany.
The Nazis were neither the first nor the last book-burners in history. Christianity has a longer history of defending an all-powerful deity by shielding the mind from strange ideas.
The ‘Dark Ages’ of the Middle Ages in Europe is full of religious atrocity , many scientists were burnt with their ideas and books: John Calvin was probably the most efficient: in 1600, when he burned Michael Servetus at the stake for heresy, and around his waist were tied a large bundle of manuscript and a thick octavo printed book. Another notorious illustration of this was in July of 1562, when Bishop Diego de Landa burnet five thousand idols and many thousands of their written works.
Scientific inquiry had virtually no support in Western society from the 7th to 15th centuries. Bigoted Ecclesiasticism dammed the flow of free thought, blocking the seepage of knowledge within Western societies. Book was branded as magic and treasonous, and the writer or reader was punishable by torture or death. Bruno was burned at the stake for the crime of claiming that the earth rotates about its axis.
Several decades after the event of Islam in Arabia, Muslim invaders of Arabia galloped in new territories. they brutally destroyed great civilisations of the Middle East. Among other losses, libraries as the symbol of knowledge and wisdom of their culture were burnt to ashes. This early book-burning of primitive Muslims paved the way for 1400 years of darkness and backwardness in the Middle East.
Muslim invaders arrived with sword in one hand and the Koran in the other. Since they believed the Koran was a divine revelation, it became the starting point. The Koran instructed them to seek knowledge in all fields. It was in this perspective and under the shadow of Islamic influences, Muslim scientists, philosophers, poets wrote their works. Even worse than the censorship, their works were influenced by their own self-alienation.
Centuries later, Muslim scientists upheld the civilisation in the world when the West was in its lowest era of moral and intellectual obscurity. However, the Islamic civilisation appeared in a limited framework of progress due to its own religiosity too.
Today, the heritage of the Nazi’s and early Muslims’ book burning became the political Islam with its shoking results in the last three decades in the Islamic world, especially in Iran and Afghanistan.
Recalling not only the book-burning of 1933 by the Nazis, but also the early invasion of Islam in Iran, the regime launched in 1980 a cultural revolution to alienate Iranians from their pre-Islamic great civilisation by islamoarbising the whole Iranian culture. Following the Cultural Revolution, bands of Hezbollah and Islamists attacked, destroyed and burnt libraries in Iran. Millions of books were destroyed, and thousands of allegedly readers of such books were imprisoned or executed.
Not only the IRI’s Ministry of Culture now censors some of Iran’s best contemporary writers and researchers, such as Sadegh Hedayat, Sadegh Choobak, Ebrahim Golestan, Gholamhossein Saaedi, Ahmad Kasravi, Ali Dashti, Ebrahim Poordavoud, Zabih Behrouz, and others, but even in the recent years, they removed parts and whole pieces of works by well-known poets such as Souzani Samarghandi, Omar Khayam, Molana Jalaledin Rumi, Nezami Ganjavi, Abid Zakani, Iradj Mirza, and even some lexicons from Ali Akbar Dehkhoda and Farhang Moeen as non-Islamic.
Contrary to the Nazis in 1933, today, IRI’s book burning and censorship are not so solely aimed at stamping out ideas of freedom but for a more nefarious purpose and in a line with the early Muslim invaders: suppressing Persian ancient culture.
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despite your apparent personal problem with Islam combined with either lack of knowledge or deliberate ignorance (your comment on 1400 years of darkness following the advent of Islam was funny), I recall you that setting limit for free speech appears in many forms, one of which is book burning and the other is media imperialism that rules today world. if one hundred years ago “free speech” was more about Production, today it’s more about Distribution. please! Internet (and so on) is not that kind of free-distribution… it lacks necessary impetus to make a movement; and that is what World Elites require: lack of movement. once upon a time, it was acheived by book burning, and today by prime time shows of this or that channel. I see no practical difference.
I would say that there certaily is a difference between book-burning and partisan and propagandist television/electronic media production. Books have traditionally been the most reliable and enduring repositories of knowledge of whatever type. While electronic media and television certainly access more people faster, and images can burn into the collective perception more fiercely, books continue to provide a depth of communication that appeals to the “intelligensia” of a society. While other forms of censorship are unappetizing, book burning has always held a particular horror for the well-read.
How many ideas and concepts, how much written art has been lost over the centuries because of ideology, jealousy, and fear? How many cultures have been gutted of their heritage by a weeks work with oil and torch?
I don’t mind telling you that, as a Westerner, one of the few things that I am very leery of in the organized religions of Islam is the tendency to destroy any work of art or literature that becomes labelled “un-Islamic”. And yes, it is behaviour that both the “Christian” and secular world (Communism, Nazism) has historically shared, for their own purposes of suppression and power retention, but that doesn’t excuse it.
Any philosophy loses its credibility when it resorts to force to refute works and ideas that disagree with it, rather than reason and discussion, and that goes for certain gun-totin western powers just as much as it goes for torch-wielding mullahs.
Yes, Islamic invaders came with flowers and candies and asked kindly to convert and when people refused to convert they handed out candies till they converted, right? Is this your version of history?
Get real… when Muslims invaded South Asia, they destroyed more libraries and temples (place where books and manuscripts were held, back in the days) than any other invader who intruded into our land. For fuck sake, even the Brits when they came, they treasured our books, they took our books and put it in their libraries. It was the invasion by the Muslims that Buddhist, Jain and Hindu cultures declined.
with regards to Islam’s advent, my version of history relies on the fact that there has been a gradual improvement in human history, and therefore its totally irrelevant if we try to judge the people of a century ago by today standards, save the people of more than a millennium ago. today we increasingly believe that capital punishment must be abolished or at least limited to very extreme cases (probably like those 5 assholes who gang-raped a newly-wed woman and then brunt her alive in Qom: source), but what if we happened to be the rulers of 500 years ago? in that period of time, capital punishment might have been the best mean to stop, say, robbery. or so.
then, if we are to judge muslim invaders, we have to compare them with their contemporary counterparts, not today standards. and in that sense, I do not find Muslim invaders of Persia that cruel that this man depicts.
Divorcing Islam from Iran is like divorcing Christianity from Greece. Get real Jahanshah.
“I don’t mind telling you that, as a Westerner, one of the few things that I am very leery of in the organized religions of Islam is the tendency to destroy any work of art or literature that becomes labelled “un-Islamic”. And yes, it is behaviour that both the “Christian” and secular world (Communism, Nazism) has historically shared, for their own purposes of suppression and power retention, but that doesn’t excuse it.”
If that was the case, then how come Muslims preserved works of Greek philosophers and translated them as well? Ever heard of Avicenna or Averroes?
“Yes, Islamic invaders came with flowers and candies and asked kindly to convert and when people refused to convert they handed out candies till they converted, right? Is this your version of history?
Get real… when Muslims invaded South Asia, they destroyed more libraries and temples (place where books and manuscripts were held, back in the days) than any other invader who intruded into our land. For fuck sake, even the Brits when they came, they treasured our books, they took our books and put it in their libraries. It was the invasion by the Muslims that Buddhist, Jain and Hindu cultures declined.”
Are you referring to tyrants like Timur the Lame?
No: I’ll have to look them up. I do recall that sometime in the 700’s the Caliph of Baghdad sent emissaries throughout the known world to translate and bring back foreign books of science. I specifically remember that Aristotle’s works on math were among them.
Dear Elinor / Elephant/ Jina
Islam as a private faith is not the problem, as long as it is be the free choice of people. The problem is a politicised Islam. The IRI follows a fascist doctrine with Islam added to it. This is political Islam and is of course the worst version of fascism. No other dictatorial regime in the world, in our generation, has such a bloody background. Like any fascist regime, the IRI recruits / manages / to have Islamist thugs and propagandists, also, on the media abroad-—see a couple of Islamist stooges on this site too.
Under the caliphate of the Umayyads, Muslims translated works of Greek philosophers who were living in today’s Egypt. At the time, Baghdad came under the rule of the Abbassids and Umayyads a world centre for learning, especially for medicine.
Certainly the Islamic civilisation inherited Greek philosophy and Iranian scientists-see the names of many Iranian scientists or Greek like Plato, Socrates, Pitagurus all arabised, see in Iranian school books!
As said, Muslim scientists were limited to a perception of truth within Islamic values; they attempted to tie Islam with any science and when impossible, banned that science or art. And only so, they were called “A’lem”. In this limited elasticity of science, freedom to express scientifically was within limits, knowledge could not stretch out to a level of the Renaissance. In another word it was doomed to stagnation, if not demise.
Today no scientific terminology in any Islam-based language facilitates the capacity for expression.
apparently you have no idea what the heitage of so-called Golden Age of Islam had been. Many thinkers (like Farabi, the philosopher who explicitly said that “those who can, reason. those who can’t, resort to revelation”, whose ideas influenced a whole school of thought), Artists (whose ‘graphic’ art works and miniature represnt love-affairs, dance and drinking), Poets (you probably know Soozani Samarghandi, Obeyd Zakani, etc) do definitely refute your account of Islam’s history. indeed there has been some Muslim scholars who behaved as you portray, but they have been neither the majority nor the only determinants. get it.
Funny, Timur’s army or what left of them assimilated into the local population. It wasn’t the case with the other Muslim invaders who saught to assimilate the population into their culture and religion.
I’ll list some names I can think of:
Muhammad bin Qasim
Mahmud of Ghazni
Nadir Shah
Babur
Akbar
Bahamani Sultans
Aurangazeb
Also, I do not judge the Muslims of the present day with the Muslims of the past or acts of a single Muslim with the entire relgion, but when someone says rosy things about Muslim invaders of the old time is for me making mockery of my dead ancestors who defended their land and were butchered by them.
PS: To all Westerners, it was the Muslims who preserved the “Western” culture as you know it now. Preservation occurred while you were busy being nazis burning books and witches.
You owe the Muslims everything you have right now in term of your “culture”… this makes me giggle every time I mention it to idiots. Of course… they will deny it and continue on with their hatemongering because facts are not compatible with their reality.
Out of all of those you listed, I have a hard time believing Akbar the Great and Babur were tyrannical, as you describe.
Aurungzeb, on the other hand, was fucking brutal.
Akbar and Babur are great for what they did AFTER they accomplished their tyrannical deeds.
If you study South Asian history, you’ll know of a tyrant who became “Great” after he single handedly killed all of his siblings to become an emperor and went on to wage war on every other nation till he conquered them all, while killing millions in the process, but he’s called great not for all the killing he did. It was for his work as a Pacifist after the fact. It was for his conversion into Buddhism and spreading the Pacifist doctrine all over the sub-continent and beyond.
Just like that Akbar, was great because he respected in many ways the local religions much like Babur. But this didn’t happen till he butchered the remaining Hindu kingdoms in Hindustan. Of course Babur was the one who started it all for the Moguls.
700 years of repeated invasions by multiple Muslims armies might just have some negative implications, no? Also, winners write history, not losers. I think we all know this.
Jina:
Yazid (2nd Ummayad Caliph, and 7th caliph after the prophet) beheaded the grandson of prophet for he failed to subscribe to Yazid’s ruling. then nobody could ever expect them to be that kind to the people of other regions. I didnt mean this, if you think so.
A O A
hello incharge,
i visited your website, i am so impressed by your teachings and work. i
found that you are doing such a wonderful worknot only for islamic people but for all people of world in the mean time. i am interested to work with your ministry or organization as a
translator. i hope so that you will consider me for this great option. i
will wait to hear from you if you have any work of translation in to urdu.
thank you
sincerely,
zainab naseem