Editing Library of Alexandria (section)

===Arabic sources on the Arab conquest===
In 642 AD, Alexandria was [[Arab conquest of Egypt|captured by an Arab army]] under the command of [[Amr ibn al-As]]. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of [[Caliph Omar|Caliph Umar]].<ref>[[Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy|De Sacy]], [https://books.google.com/books?id=NGrRAAAAMAAJ {{lang|fr|Relation de l'Egypte par Abd al-Latif}}], Paris, 1810. [http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=4926 Translated] by Roger Pearse. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110511081440/http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=4926|date=11 May 2011}}. "Above the column of the pillars is a dome supported by this column. I think this building was the portico where Aristotle taught, and after him his disciples; and that this was the academy that Alexander built when he built this city, and where was placed the library which Amr ibn-Alas burned, with the permission of Omar."</ref> The earliest was [[al-Qifti]] who described the story in a biographical dictionary ''History of Learned Men'', written before 1248.<ref>Samir Khalil. {{lang|fr|italic=no|"L'utilisation d'al-Qifṭī par la Chronique arabe d'Ibn al-'Ibrī († 1286)"}}. In Samir Khalil Samir, ed. {{lang|fr|Actes du IIe symposium syro-arabicum (Sayyidat al-Bīr, septembre 1998). Études arabes chrétiennes, {{=}} Parole de l'Orient}} 28 (2003) 551–598. An English translation of the passage in Al-Qifti by Emily Cottrell of Leiden University is acceptable [http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=5004 at the Roger Pearse blog]. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110511081446/http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=5004|date=11 May 2011}}</ref> [[Bar-Hebraeus]], writing in the thirteenth century, quotes Umar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī ([[John Philoponus]]): "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." So, Ibn al Qifti recounts, the general ordered that the books be burned to fuel the fires that heated Alexandria's city baths. It is said that they were enough to provide heating for six months.<ref>Ed. Pococke, p. 181, translation on p. 114. [http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=4936 Translated] by Roger Pearse. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100915061814/http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=4936|date=15 September 2010}}. {{langx|la|Quod ad libros quorum mentionem fecisti: si in illis contineatur, quod cum libro Dei conveniat, in libro Dei [est] quod sufficiat absque illo; quod si in illis fuerit quod libro Dei repugnet, neutiquam est eo [nobis] opus, jube igitur e medio tolli. Jussit ergo Amrus Ebno'lAs dispergi eos per balnea Alexandriae, atque illis calefaciendis comburi; ita spatio semestri consumpti sunt. Audi quid factum fuerit et mirare.}}</ref>

Later scholars, beginning with Father [[Eusèbe Renaudot]] in his 1713 translation of the ''[[History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria]]'', are skeptical of these stories, given the amount of time that had passed before they were recorded and the political motivations of the various authors.<ref>E. Gibbon, ''Decline and Fall'', chapter 51: "It would be endless to enumerate the moderns who have wondered and believed, but I may distinguish with honour the rational scepticism of Renaudot, (Hist. Alex. Patriarch, p. 170: ) 'historia ... habet aliquid ut απιστον ut Arabibus familiare est.' However Butler says: 'Renaudot thinks the story has an element of untrustworthiness: Gibbon discusses it rather briefly and disbelieves it.{{'"}} (ch. 25, p. 401)</ref><ref>{{cite magazine|url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3517|title=The Vanished Library by Bernard Lewis|magazine=The New York Review of Books|access-date=26 November 2006|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061116003731/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3517|archive-date=16 November 2006|url-status=live|date=27 September 1990|last1=Lewis|first1=Bernard|last2=Lloyd-Jones|first2=Hugh}}</ref>{{sfn|Trumble|MacIntyre Marshall|2003|p=51|ps=.&nbsp;"Today most scholars have discredited the story of the destruction of the Library by the Muslims."}} [[Roy MacLeod]], for example, points out that the story first appeared 500 years after the event, that John Philoponus was almost certainly dead by the time of the conquest of Egypt and that both the Great Library of Alexandria and the Mouseion were likely long gone by then.{{sfn|MacLeod|2000|p=71|ps=.&nbsp;"The story first appears 500 years after the Arab conquest of Alexandria. John the Grammarian appears to be John Philoponus, who must have been dead by the time of the conquest. It seems, as shown above, that both of the Alexandrian libraries were destroyed by the end of the fourth century, and there is no mention of any library surviving at Alexandria in the Christian literature of the centuries following that date. It is also suspicious that Omar is recorded to have made the same remark about books found by the Arab during their conquest of Iran."}} According to Diana Delia, "Omar's rejection of pagan and Christian wisdom may have been devised and exploited by conservative authorities as a moral exemplum for Muslims to follow in later, uncertain times, when the devotion of the faithful was once again tested by proximity to nonbelievers".<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Diana|first=Delia|date=December 1992|title=From Romance to Rhetoric: The Alexandrian Library in Classical and Islamic Traditions|journal=The American Historical Review|volume=97|issue=5|pages=1449–1467|doi=10.2307/2165947|jstor=2165947}}</ref> The historian [[Bernard Lewis]] suggests the myth came into existence during the reign of [[Saladin]] in order to justify the Sunni [[Ayyubid dynasty|Ayyubids]]' breaking up of the Shia [[Fatimid Caliphate|Fatimid]] collections and library at public auction.<ref>Bernard Lewis (2008). Mostafa El-Abbadi and Omnia Mounir Fathallah, eds. ''What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria''. Leiden: Brill. pp. 213–217</ref>