“The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive.”
―
Joshua Hammer,
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
