A Benedictine monk's mission to save the ancient manuscripts of the Islamic world
Posted
A Benedictine monk working to preserve Islamic manuscripts may at first sound like a contradiction.
At his offices outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Father Columba Stewart and his small team at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library pore over some of the world's most precious and endangered pieces of history.
The wintry climes of north-eastern United States are worlds away from the towns and cities of the Middle East and west Africa where many of the manuscripts are located.
But the rise of the Islamic State group has posed an unmistakable threat to their integrity, so Father Stewart wants to preserve them.
So far his team has managed to photograph more than 140,000 complete manuscripts and more than 50 million handwritten pages.
"It certainly can be [dangerous work] because our local partners are the people who are living there all the time, who are often in the advance of some kind of invading force, having to grab manuscripts and run with them," Father Stewart said.
"So places like Iraq remain very dangerous, as is Syria. Mali in West Africa where we've worked with the Timbuktu manuscripts is a place that's always quite volatile."
It all began when Father Stewart and his team were working in the Old City of Jerusalem, around the corner from some historic Muslim family libraries.
"[We] decided if these people have lived together in the same place for centuries, and their books have lived in such close proximity as neighbours, why wouldn't we want to preserve that heritage as well?
"These manuscripts contain not only the deep thoughts, religious convictions, history of these particular communities, but they also record their interactions.
"And studying the interactions between religious groups in the past might just give us a clue for how to do it in the future."
But finding and successfully preserving such precious documents can prove a daunting task, and access to them is often dependent on international events.
"We have heard stories about the destruction of manuscripts in Iraq particularly, and we're only now being able to have our Iraqi friends go back into some of those places," Father Stewart said.
"I'll be going over in May myself to visit some of the villages that have recently been recaptured from Islamic State.
"There are also collections in Syria that we never got to — we hope that they've found a way to keep them safe."
Manuscripts give 'a whole new window onto the past'
According to Father Stewart, the most precious manuscripts he comes across are not often the most opulent.
"People are often imagining beautifully illuminated manuscripts with lots of gold dripping off the page," he said.
"While it's true we have photographed manuscripts like that, beautiful illuminated Christian gospel books or beautiful golden Korans, some of the most important texts we've photographed are not particularly impressive to look at.
"But then you learn that it's the only surviving copy of a very, very important ancient text, and that's the kind of manuscript that gives us a whole new window onto the past."
Father Stewart's team work with local family libraries, which have collected many books, in the places they visit to locate crucial Islamic manuscripts.
Through slowly developing a relationship with them over time, they are able to build trust "until they get a sense that you're for real", Father Stewart said.
Although sometimes there is some resistance to his mission from some families, Father Stewart said he can understand why.
"There are people who are afraid that once it's digitised and put on the internet, somehow they've lost control of it," he said.
"I understand that anxiety, because often these are people who have suffered from people coming from outside their culture and then taking their cultural heritage.
"[But] I think this recognition of the extreme unpredictability that seems to be part of the modern world is making people realise that their heritage may not be as safe as they thought."
Comments