{"id":8548,"date":"2026-08-18T00:58:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T22:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/?p=8548"},"modified":"2026-08-18T18:17:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T16:17:31","slug":"from-bayt-al-hikma-to-silicon-valley-fascist-book-burnings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/18\/from-bayt-al-hikma-to-silicon-valley-fascist-book-burnings\/","title":{"rendered":"From Bayt Al-Hikma to Silicon Valley: Fascist book burnings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The destruction of knowledge, whether by algorithm, occupation, or bureaucracy is an act of power and a prelude to fascism<\/strong>, writes Zeenat Adam<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1258 CE, when Hulagu Khan and his Mongol hordes laid siege to Baghdad, Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), where for centuries scholars translated Aristotle, advanced disciplines of astronomy, medicine, philosophy and mathematics, was destroyed. The Tigris River ran black for days with the ink of the books \u2013 an extinction of a civilisation\u2019s claim to intellectual sovereignty. Historically, those who destroy sources of knowledge, seek not only to control the minds to rule over people, but often, follow with the annihilation of people who oppose them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The modern wave of knowledge destruction should terrify us. Occupation, state control, and political domination require amnesia of a nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artificial intelligence <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The AI industry\u2019s hunger for \u201cpre-LLM: text is particularly insidious. Recent court filings in San Francisco revealed that Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude, ran an internal program called \u201cProject Panama<\/a>\u201d \u2013 an effort, in the company\u2019s own words, to \u201cdestructively scan all the books in the world.\u201d Millions of print books were bought, their spines sliced off by hydraulic cutters, their pages fed through industrial scanners, and the paper discarded. A federal judge ruled it legal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The preference for books published before 2022 are targeted because they are \u201cstructurally guaranteed\u201d to be free of AI-generated contamination. The logic is that the machines need pure human output to learn from, then proceed to destroy the original \u2013 a form of auto-cannibalism. Retain the book, and there are two copies; shred it and there is only one digital source that could be subject to manipulation and erasure. Booksellers in Europe report anonymous bulk orders<\/a> for rare and out-of-print titles, brokered by services that keep buyers\u2019 identities hidden. While the books may not be burning in a public square, the shredders are hidden behind non-disclosure agreements or euphemisms like \u201cdestructive digitisation\u201d to manage the optics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Censorship and national security <\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kashmir is the overtly political face of the same phenomenon. When books like \u201cKashmir: The Case for Freedom\u201d or \u201cAzadi,\u201d are marked as contraband in the name of national security, it is a deliberate method of occupation and securitisation. The Jammu and Kashmir administration, appointed directly by New Delhi, answerable to no local electorate, ordered a full audit of every library and educational institution in the territory, hunting for \u201cobjectionable material.\u201d Police conducted raids, seizing books \u201cglorifying terrorism\u201d or undermining the sovereignty of the Indian state. Twenty-five books were declared \u201cforfeited\u201d for the crime of contested history. Before that, police seized 668 titles by a single Islamic scholar from Srinagar\u2019s shops. A Kashmiri anthropologist has a word for what is happening: memoricide<\/a> – the killing of a people\u2019s memory of themselves; a deliberate campaign to make it impossible for Kashmiris to encounter their own history except in the version their occupiers approve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While New Zealand\u2019s National Library<\/a> cull of half-million-books appears reasonable under the guise of administrative rationale; no demand, no room, no budget, it mirrors the \u201ccomprehensive audit\u201d of Srinagar. The Quran, Bible, Torah, and classics such as Shakespeare and Dickens have succumbed to the curatorial power: the authority to determine what is retained and preserved, and what may deserve the landfill. When a bookseller offered $160,000 to save the surplus books from the shredder, the offer was declined and the books were fated to rotting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an age of information abundance, and with access to the internet, which we were promised would be the new Library of Alexandria<\/a>, though more advanced, digitised, fireproof, and decentralised, we must question the pulping of books. The burning of the Library of Alexandria as a slow-motion catastrophe, by Caesar\u2019s fire, Aurelian\u2019s siege, mob violence of 391 AD, or the bureaucratic strangulation of late antiquity \u2013 did not just destroy scrolls. Each act was political. Each reduced the Mediterranean world to what its conquerors wanted to be retained in memory. In an age where algorithms now determine what we see and what is buried, we must consider how the purge of books is censorship and control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1499, Cardinal Cisneros<\/a> ordered the burning in public squares of the most advanced repository of knowledge; tens of thousands of Arabic manuscripts in Granada, Cordoba and Toledo; the accumulated scholarship of eight centuries of Andalusian Muslim civilisation, were turned to bonfires as the Reconquista perpetrated its xenophobic purge. The books went first. The expulsions and forced conversations followed. Knowledge destruction was not incidental to those campaigns \u2013 it was their opening move, because a people who cannot read their own history cannot argue with the story being told about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fascism of the twenty-first century is hidden behind \u201cdataset\u201d or \u201coptimisation.\u201d Control the archive and you control the argument. The 1933 Nazi book burnings<\/a> of anything \u201cun-German\u201d preceded the human crematoriums. The Tigris River ran red with blood of humans after it ran black from the destruction of Bayt al-Hikma. The bonfires in Granada were followed by the inquisition. When New Delhi decides Kashmiris cannot read Arundhati Roy, when Wellington decides half a million books are worth less than the cost of storing them, when Silicon Valley decides the physical form of a book is disposable once its contents have been ingested, each version of scholasticide is not just an erasure of education and epistemology, but an erasure of history. This is preparation for a world of heightened control through the destruction of knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zeenat Adam is a former diplomat and an independent international relations strategist based in Johannesburg, South Africa<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The destruction of knowledge, whether by algorithm, occupation, or bureaucracy is an act of power and a prelude to fascism, writes Zeenat Adam. In 1258 CE, when Hulagu Khan and his Mongol hordes laid siege to Baghdad, Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), where for centuries scholars translated Aristotle, advanced disciplines of astronomy, medicine, philosophy and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":8549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,205],"tags":[519,43,886,1315,605,595,405,455,1316],"class_list":["post-8548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-opinion","category-trending","tag-1-nation-media","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-books","tag-history","tag-islamic-history","tag-one-nation-media","tag-onm","tag-zeenat-adam"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t