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The recent communal violence which burned down the Azizia Madrasa occurred in the wake of numerous recent laws targeting Muslims

Museums & Heritagecomment'What the violent destruction of a Muslim library in Bihar tells us about the troubling state of Islamic heritage in India'The recent communal violence which burned down the Azizia Madrasa occurred in the wake of numerous recent laws targeting Muslims Vivek Gupta2 May 2023ShareA pile of burnt books at the Azizia Madrasa library Courtesy of Meer FaisalOn 31 March, the day of a Hindu religious festival and during Ramadan, an extremist mob set a Muslim school, the Azizia Madrasa, and its library ablaze in the city of Bihar Sharif in eastern India. More than 4,500 printed books and manuscripts of Islamic heritage were lost and damaged in the fire. The throng also threw petrol bombs into a nearby mosque and left explosives outside the madrasa’s classrooms. Since the attack, the district’s superintendent of police, Ashok Mishra, has stated that 77 people have been arrested. One person died in the violence, and several remain injured.Endowed by a woman named Bibi Soghra around a century ago, today the madrasa has 22 classrooms, which serve up to 450 students. Such madrasas form the core of Muslim communities and foster childhood development and education. Now, ashes of burned books line the floors of the school’s library. Images show an imam holding a manuscript with burnt edges and several destroyed handwritten books strewn across the grounds. The histories of these books are forever fragmented.Anti-Muslim contextThis communal violence occurs in the wake of numerous recent laws targeting Muslims on both national and state levels in India. Yet these events have not drawn nearly as much uproar as previous cases, raising concerns as to whether this has become anodyne for the mainstream Indian public and media. Most recently, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (Ncert) dropped entire chapters and sections on Mughal history from Indian school textbooks, effectively erasing three centuries of Indian history from public education and skewing the perspectives of future generations. Leading historians across the world have condemned this, but it is unclear whether that will make any impact.Bihar has had at least two great sites of learning during its long history. From at least the fifth century AD it witnessed the rise of Nalanda, a Buddhist monastic university, or vihara, from which the region derives its name. The medieval historian Juzjani drew an equivalence between the concept of a vihara and madrasa in his description of Bakhtiyar Khalji’s conquest of Nalanda at the beginning of the 13th century. He noted that the Buddhist site boasted many books and recognised it as a place of deep knowledge, despite its conquest.Bihar’s capital Patna also houses the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, a world-class collection of rare books and manuscripts, especially in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, which opened to the public in 1891. A history of Timur and his successors with 132 full-page paintings commissioned around 1584 stands as one of the library’s finest masterpieces. Yet, in 2021, Bihar’s government proposed to build a flyover that would involve razing a historical part of the library and endangering the safety of the collection. Widespread disapproval halted this plan.Whether it’s a Buddhist monastery, Muslim madrasa or public manuscript repository, the government of India and international parties must protect heritage whatever its religious affiliation. Unesco has stepped in to protect vulnerable heritage in many other times of crisis globally, and the evidence—from razing Muslim monuments to burning libraries—speaks in favour of intervention. The stewardship of the Endangered Archives Programme and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, both supported by the Arcadia Fund, have led the way for digitising collections that could be subject to destruction, neglect or decay, but further institutional and governmental collaboration is necessary for all endangered archives to be documented.When heritage such as the Azizia Madrasa vanishes, a physical anchor for an entire community ceases to exist within history. Globally, we might even lose the ability to answer questions about the faraway past. For example, a calligraphic practice indigenous to premodern South Asia identified as Bihari apparently acquired this designation because of an association with Bihar. Other reasons for this name have been put forth, but researchers still have no definitive evidence as to why or how this calligraphy came to be popularly known as Bihari. Is the name a modern myth or does it have some historical credence? Given the script’s close relationship to Sufi practices and the long history of Sufism in Bihar, this may have been one reason for the connection. Perhaps the answer lay amid the rubble of the Azizia Madrasa for a student of its community to bring to light. Now, this archive is lost forever.Qur’an Manuscript, Gwalior, India, 11 July 1399, AKM281 (f.189r-190v) © The Aga Khan MuseumThe burnin...