Fire Destroys Oldest School Library in Kashmir

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/alnews2004/july2004ab/kashmir.cfm

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Posted July 9, 2004.

Fire Destroys Oldest School Library in Kashmir

Police suspect Islamic separatists were responsible for a July 5 fire that gutted a 115-year-old school in Srinagar, the capital of India’s Jammu-Kashmir state, and incinerated its entire collection of 30,000 rare Islamic texts—including one of the oldest existing Korans, handwritten by Uthman ibn Affan (d. 656), the third Righteous Caliph of Islam.

Businesses and schools were closed the following day as hundreds of people, including former students, took to the streets to protest the burning of the Islamia Higher Secondary School, said to be a landmark in the movement to modernize Islam, the Associated Press reported July 6.

“The school was Kashmir’s first step towards modernity,” retired engineer Ashraf Andrabi said. “It has been the alma mater of everybody who has been anybody in Kashmir.”

The Islamia school was run by the family of Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, a moderate Islamic leader who had been targeted in recent months by extremists supporting an independent Kashmir.

Posted July 9, 2004.