Scholar disputes Reuter's report that Americans made off with Iraqi manuscripts
An expert in Iraqi manuscripts said that the Americans robbed a bunch of manuscripts in April 2003, which included a Torah [written] in leather and did not care about Iraqi warnings that Israel has been working to get them.--Reuters
This [story] is indeed an unfounded rumor, which may in part be sustained due to the demonstrable fact that the US army grabbed huge numbers of Iraqi archival materials from government ministries and other sources, and that other private entities, such as the Iraq Memory Foundation and Iraqi political parties, laid their hands on many more. But those are modern archival materials not the enormous collection of historical manuscripts comprising the Dar Al-Makhtutat Al-'Iraqiyya, or Iraqi House of Manuscripts, formerly the Dar Saddam lil-Makhtutat, the Saddam House of Manuscripts.
I had hoped that our friends at the U of Chicago IraqCrisis website would have posted my new July report on this general subject by now. In it I tried very hard to establish the current condition of these various institutions and what happened to them in 2003, with an in depth discussion of the events surrounding the assaults on the INLA, thoroughly updating the descriptions in my 2005 report. Since this has not happened, my friends at ArchNet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done so. It is entitled Iraqi Libraries and Archives in Peril: Survival in a time of Invasion, Chaos, and Civil Conflict, A Report
and may be found via:
Nevertheless, it would be a relief to all to have a present accounting of the status of collections of the Dar Al-Makhtutat Al-'Iraqiyya.
Jeffrey B. Spurr
Islamic and Middle East Specialist
Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
Fine Arts Library, Harvard University