When 301,878 books
were murdered in Turkey...
Death of books? What exactly happened?
Since 2016, the government of Turkey has pulled
back from its schools, stores and libraries, and destroyed, over three lakh
books. And that’s according to official estimates — revealed this week by none
other than Turkey’s education minister Ziya Selcuk.
Oh dear! But why 2016?
That year witnessed a failed military coup and
Turkey’s current regime accused a US-based Muslim cleric — Fethullah Gülen —
with instigating the event. And the destroyed books are linked to the event and
its alleged perpetrator. Interestingly, Gülen always denied any involvement in
the 2016 coup d’état. But the government of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is
not buying it and instead is cracking down on all forms of dissent.
That’s terrible!
Indeed. Reports published in the international
media, including The Guardian, reveal the absurd ways in which Turkey has been
trying to silence dissent. For instance, the government banned a maths textbook
which said somewhere in it that something was travelling from point F to point
G. Since, the letters F and G stand for Fethullah Gulen, the ministry felt the
book should be recalled and redone.
Bizarre!
Here’s more: in 2016 itself, some 18 lakh textbooks
were re-jigged (destroyed, redone or reprinted) just because they carried the
word Pennsylvania, which the regime felt was very objectionable.
Why?
Because the rebel cleric Gulen apparently lives
there. Several media outlets in and outside Turkey have published visuals of
the books being destroyed, reminding readers of the shocking images of book
burning from history and bringing to light the immediate demand to protect free
speech and the right to dissent. A statement from PEN International, a
non-profit collective of writers and activists worldwide, says nearly 30
publishing houses downed shutters in just three years after the government put
curbs on them for spreading what it calls terrorist propaganda.
That’s astonishing!
PEN paints an alarming picture of Turkey’s
intellectual scene in its 2018 report. The Guardian quotes PEN saying 200
publishing entities vanished after the 2016 coup, while 80 writers are under
probe and more than 5,800 teachers were fired from 118 government universities.
Less wonder then they burned all those books!
You said it! In fact, this is not the first time in
history an angry regime is cracking down on books. As recently as in 2012, when
al-Qaida militants attacked Mali, they destroyed precious and ancient books and
manuscripts — many of the books were on Islamic culture dating back to the 13th
and 16th centuries and were on Unesco’s World Heritage List.
If you travel back in history, in 213 BC, Chinese
emperor Qin Shi Huang made a bonfire of books. His aim: as a mark of
consolidating his power and eliminating bad ideas! In fact, in 259-210 BC,
another Chinese emperor, Shih Huang Ti, buried alive 460 Confucian scholars,
not just books, as he wanted to control, the writing of history in his time.
How cruel!
From Roman emperor Caligula’s infamous opposition
to The Odyssey by Homer, and caliph Omar burning all the 200,000 volumes at
Alexandria library in Egypt, to Roman Catholic Church’s nefarious attempts to
ban books that went against its morals, to Nazi’s burning books they never
liked, which included Jack London’s Call of the Wild — history is replete with
examples of powers trying to clamp down on books to curb dissent.
But as history shows us, in the end, the letter and
the spirit they are written with, outwit all such attempts. Is Turkey
listening?
Source | Business Line | 8th August 2019
Regards
Mr. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library & Information Science (NET
Qualified)
Research Scholar (IGNOU)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
Mobile @
9665911593
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