President Erdoğan: Timur built such a peaceful city as Samarkand and made it the capital of science by setting up libraries

“The Nation’s Library will serve as a proper complex. We have designed this place not only as a building that houses bookshelves, but also as a center of wisdom and culture that brings together people of wisdom. We have built a place where works and studies will be conducted around book culture, and gatherings of knowledge will be held,” the presidential press service of Turkey quotes Erdoğan as saying.

Stating that each book is a scholar, President Erdoğan noted: “If you have hundreds of books, it means that you are a friend of hundreds of scholars and that you benefit from their knowledge. And it is kind of living the life of heaven in the world and tasting the fruits of the heaven. Because, we are the members of a civilization that considers every scholar to be a tree of heaven, whose shadow should be benefitted from, and books as the fruits of that tree. Our ancestors preferred a library, whose shelves were filled with books, to the most precious treasures. Whichever city you go to in Turkey, you will see libraries that defy the centuries while enlightening their environs like a lamp.”

“Throughout history, wherever there was a struggle to build a civilization and to bring prosperity, there was also the struggle to construct a library,” Erdoğan stressed. “Wherever there was a genocide, war and destruction of civilization, the first target was the libraries as well. Whereas the Mongol armies under the command of Hulagu burned down libraries, Timur built such a peaceful city as Samarkand and made it the capital of science by setting up libraries. Likewise, at the center were libraries both when Andalusia started to be described and when it stopped to be described as the shining star of the Islamic civilization.”

President Erdoğan went on to say: “Today as well, similar massacres of cultures are taking place as libraries are unfortunately being targeted. DAESH and other terrorist organizations razed to the ground the most important monuments of the Islamic culture and civilization by bombing libraries which were home to thousands of rare books in Iraq and Syria. Our civilization, however, had been at the center of scientific advances throughout centuries. Our ancestors, who didn’t shy away from going to the remotest corners of the world in pursuit of knowledge and devoted their lives to scientific researches, bequeathed us this civilization of affection and knowledge which we are proud to inherit.”