How far the story of Omar's commanding the baths of Alexandria to be
heated with the books from the great library is true, we shall never
know. Some have doubted the story altogether: but so many fresh
corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic
writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact.
One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian
grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library,
took care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever
strongly Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the
Koran were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be
destroyed, the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very
different. As they settled in the various countries which they
conquered, education seems to have been considered by them an important
object. We even find some of them, in the same generation as Mohammed,
obeying strictly the Prophet's command to send all captive children to
school--a fact which speaks as well for the Mussulmans' good sense, as
it speaks ill for the state of education among the degraded descendants
of the Greek conquerors of the East.
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