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This Minnesota Monk Saves Ancient Manuscripts for... | Christianity Today - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...manuscript-rescue-witness.html

Islam Christianity manuscript history heritage museums libraries Mali Syria Lebanon Iraq Egypt

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Jan 20 - Cached
  • Stewart is a monk—a Benedictine brother at St. John’s College, in Minnesota, part of the order that built libraries in the Middle Ages, preserving and reproducing Bibles by hand, along with psalters, books of martyrs, and Greek and Arabic philosophy. So Stewart knew his responsibility in Timbuktu. He had to save the ancient manuscripts. When the shooting stopped, Stewart spent the next two days training Malians to run a mobile digitization studio to preserve the more than 300,000 Islamic manuscripts that al-Qaeda might have destroyed.
  • He has rescued documents in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, as well as Egypt, Ethiopia, and India—saving biblical texts and some of the most significant documents for the church in the Middle East, as well as Muslim texts
  • He trains local leaders to preserve their heritage, and in exchange they allow him to make the documents available online.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The St. John’s library now hosts the largest digital collection of old manuscripts in the world, including 250,000 full books and 75 million individual handwritten pages.
  • Stewart thinks the Timbuktu manuscripts are his greatest prize. By preserving Islamic manuscripts, he believes he is being faithful to his Benedictine calling. Speaking to the NEA, Stewart comparing his work in Mali with Peter the Venerable, the 12th-century abbot who oversaw the translation of the Quran into Latin. “As medieval Christian scholars of Arabic manuscripts came to understand, their enemy was not Islam, however deep their theological differences,” he said. “The common enemy was—and remains—the fanaticism and ignorance that make understanding impossible.”
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