|
Tuesday, April 22 2003 @ 10:06 AM Central Daylight Time
|
 Baghdad, IRAQ, April 22, 2003 - The largest library in Baghdad, which was severely damaged by looters in recent weeks, is now being moved in the name of a "rescue operation" to Najaf, the educational and cultural center of the Shiites. Iraqis arriving at the Ministry of Culture's Office of Documents and Books, off-limits to the Shiites during the Saddam era, said they were moving the books to a safe location.
Numerous volunteers loaded the collection into trucks waiting in front of the ministry, whose entrance proclaims that most works written between the years 1397 and 1988 are contained the facility's library. When asked why the books were being moved, Najaf Hafze (Shiite Education Center) member Sayyid Mumin Musevi said: "We need to take them to a safer place because, having started a fire with some special materials, U.S. troops destroyed some of the historic volumes."
The priceless collection once included the 1,400-year-old Noble Koran, which Imam Ali wrote by hand, and the Nahcul Belaga, the handbook of Sina religious training that includes the sayings of Imam Ali; however the whereabouts of these works are currently unknown. Kemal Sarikahya, an Information Ministry official conversant with such volumes, says that these two works are worth billions of dollars, to say nothing of their spiritual value.
Fatih Ugur / Baghdad / IRAQ
|
|
