(Roughly) Daily

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 Qarawiyyin library, the oldest in the world, 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…

Now, after years of restoration, the library is finally set to reopen – with strict security and a new underground canal system to protect its most prized manuscripts.

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…

“The people who work here jealously guard the books,” says one of the caretakers. “You can hurt us, but you cannot hurt the books.”…

Read the whole story at “World’s oldest library reopens in Fez.”

* Albert Einstein

###

As we browse in bliss, we might spare a thought for S. R. Ranganathan; he died on this date in 1972.  A mathematician and librarian, he is best remembered for his five laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification (in which books are classified by facets rather than in a hierarchical taxonomy). He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the fields. His birthday is observed every year as the National Library Day in India.

 source