Like most bibliophiles, I was saddened by reports that Islamic
militants fleeing Timbuktu had set fire to a library containing
irreplaceable medieval Islamic manuscripts. I don’t know whether
Michael Covitt, chairman of the Malian Manuscript Foundation, is
right to claim that these manuscripts contained “the wisdom of the
ages,” but I do agree that their destruction is a “desecration to
humanity.”
As it happens, I’m currently reading a collection of essays by
the late Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, and while wondering
what could possibly motivate Muslims to destroy priceless parts of
their own heritage, I came across this description of his encounter
with the New Left:
When I was leaving Poland at the end of 1968, I had a somewhat
vague idea of what the radical student movement and different
leftist groups or parties might be. What I saw and read I found
pathetic and disgusting in nearly all (still, not all) cases.… What
impressed me was mental degradation of a kind I had never seen
before in any leftist movement. I saw young people trying to
‘“reconstitute” universities and to liberate them from horrifying,
savage, monstrous fascist oppression… In several cases in the U.S.,
the vanguard of the oppressed toiling masses set fire to university
libraries (irrelevant pseudo-knowledge of the Establishment).
Kolakowski didn’t say how many American students participated in
campus book-burnings, and a quick Google search revealed that no
one really knows. Estimates vary from Kirkpatrick Sales’ claim that
as many as one million people participated in “rioting, trashing,
assaults on buildings and confrontations with the police,” to Dan
Grorgakas’ assertion that “the number of people who participated in
armed struggle numbered in the hundreds.”
But whatever the precise number, it’s clear that there was a
hard-core group of New Leftists who thought that destroying
libraries and other outposts of bourgeois culture was a great idea,
and a much larger group of young people who disapproved of actual
arson, but who, in light of the Vietnam war, sympathized with the
New Left jihadists and their grievances.
The situation throughout the Muslim world today does not seem
all that different from the situation on American campuses in the
late sixties and early seventies. There, too, there are a minority
of Islamist fanatics who think that burning down libraries – and
murdering or mutilating “the sons of pigs and apes” (aka “fascist
pigs”) who disapprove of such activities – are meritorious acts,
and a much larger number of otherwise decent Muslims who, in light
of such ongoing atrocities as Afghanistan, Iraq, and “Palestine,”
sympathize with the Islamists.
I don’t know what will happen to the Malian Islamists who
escaped from Timbuktu. Most of them, I imagine, will be hunted down
and killed by the Malian army, but some may live to brag about
their exploits to their children and grandchildren. Nor do I know
what happened to our own New Leftists – numbering somewhere between
several hundred and one million – who created such havoc back in
the days of LBJ and RN. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if some
of these ex-radicals are now gainfully employed by the CIA, helping
to wage what used to be called the “War on Terror.” These former
enragés needn’t look to obscure Islamic texts or dense
sociological treatises to understand what makes the Islamists tick.
All they need to do is recall the promptings of their own hearts,
and the strength of their own passions.
