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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: conflagration Theologians, Catholic and Protestant, have been
fond of quoting it as an instance of the hostility of
Mahometanism to knowledge, and we have even heard an edifying
sermon preached about it. On seeing the story put to such uses,
one feels sometimes like using the ad hominem argument, and
quoting the wholesale destruction of pagan libraries under
Valens, the burning of books by the Latin stormers of
Constantinople, the alleged annihilation of 100,000 volumes by
Genoese crusaders at Tripoli, the book-burning exploits of
Torquemada, the bonfire of 80,000 valuable Arabic manuscripts,
lighted up in the square of Granada by order of Cardinal Ximenes,
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
