Preserving the Christian legacy by disguising it.
What he is doing, he says, is even more important to the Christian minority's fate in northern Iraq: He is rounding up ancient manuscripts and relics and hiding them in secure locations around Kurdistan, hoping to save them from the iconoclastic fury of the terror insurgency.
"If Daesh burns down a church we can rebuild it, but the manuscripts are our history. They trace back our roots, they are part of our civilization," he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. "If they get destroyed, then we are lost, and our culture will be forgotten."
Not forgotten from the mind of God. Nevertheless, it is good work that he is doing.
It's like the Dead Sea scrolls.
ReplyDeleteAmazing how much Islam tends to burn up and destroy, such as the Library of Alexandria.
What little is left of Christianity that escaped the ME, what little is left of Western philosophy and documents, were "preserved" by Islam. Preserved in the sense that they just didn't get around to wiping it out of existence, that is.
They made some improvements, at least Avicenna did. It was all based on a mistake, though. He was given a "Theology of Aristotle" that actually turned out to have been written by Plotinus. Still, his attempt to make the two cohere turned out to represent a real improvement in the metaphysics. It became quite important in Christian theology, later, when early Christian saints who were influenced by neoplatonism needed to be brought into coherence with Aristotle. Avicenna shows the way to make that work (with the neoplatonic works continuing to have value, metaphysically, even though Aristotle's physics and metaphysics are not thought to be accurate now).
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