“In the Koran,” declared Alia Muhammad Baker, a public librarian in Basra, Iraq, “the first thing God said to Muhammad was ‘Read.'”
This remark, quoted in a celebrated 2003 story in the New York Times, was the seed for two new remarkable books about a woman of unfathomable foresight, courage and determination, the one who saved more than 30,000 volumes from the Basra Central Library when the flames of war descended upon Iraq.
Chicago Sun-Times has more.
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