By The Atlantic
Rescuing the world's most precious antiquities from destruction is a
painstaking project--and a Benedictine monk may seem like an unlikely
person to lead the charge. But Father Columba Stewart is determined.
Soft-spoken, dressed in flowing black robes, this 59-year-old American
has spent the past 13 years roaming from the Balkans to the Middle East
in an effort to save Christian and Islamic manuscripts threatened by
wars, theft, weather--and, lately, the Islamic State.
"Given
what's happened in the last years since the rise of ISIS, it's very
clear that things are really endangered," Stewart said. "It's imperative
to make sure that these manuscripts are safe, because we don't know
what will happen to them."
As ISIS militants have destroyed
countless artifacts, Stewart has attempted to counter them by working
with Christian and Muslim communities in hotspots such as Iraq and
Syria. He has trained local teams to photograph centuries-old books with
the help of the non-profit organization he directs, the Hill Museum
& Manuscript Library (HMML). Based out of Saint John's Abbey and
University in Collegeville, Minnesota, HMML is dedicated to preserving
endangered manuscripts on microfilm and in digital format. So far, it
has managed to photograph more than 140,000 complete manuscripts, for a
total of more than 50,000,000 handwritten pages, according to the
organization's website.
But digitization is only the last stage in
a slow and sometimes frustrating process. Getting in touch with the
various religious orders, cultural organizations, and families that hold
manuscript collections can require years of traveling and a lot of
diplomacy aimed at gaining trust--with no guarantee of a positive
outcome.
Many of the communities Stewart approaches have been
scarred by years of war, persecution or displacement, and are wary of
outsiders. Some are especially skeptical about granting Westerners
access to cultural treasures, given the tens of thousands of manuscripts
looted during the colonial period and now housed in various museums and
libraries around Europe. This is where Stewart's reputation as a monk
comes into play.
"Everybody knows about the
Benedictines--manuscripts and learning, this is part of our identity, a
brand which is somehow universal," he said. Indeed, his involvement with
manuscripts began almost accidentally when, in 2003, he was asked to
join an HMML preparatory field trip to Lebanon due to his monastic
connections. "Being a monk puts me in a very different category. People understand I
am not representing a big business or an imperialist cultural agency."
Also crucial to this understanding is HMML's
policy of training local people, who keep total physical control of the
manuscripts. "We never touch the manuscripts," Stewart explained. "They
are the ones doing the work and getting paid for it. They feel proud
because they can say 'We did this,' which is true."
In Jerusalem,
where HMML has been digitizing four Islamic and Christian collections,
the process is handled by Shaima Budeiry, who studied manuscript
preservation in Dubai. She has spent the past several years
photographing thousands of pages, including those of her family's
private collection.
"I feel very proud of what I am doing," she
said, showing me a beautiful manuscript decorated with gold, owned by
the Budeiry Library. She wore gloves to avoid damaging the delicate
pages. "I like this job because this collection belongs to my
ancestors."
Stewart visits Jerusalem yearly, and it was there that
I recently observed him meeting with stern Orthodox Syrian monks,
influential Armenian patriarchs, and cosmopolitan Palestinian families.
One morning, as the sun shone on the domes of the minarets of the Old
City, I followed him through the narrow alleys of the souq. Stopping in
front of an iron door surmounted by a stone arch, he entered the gate of
St. Mark's Syrian Orthodox Monastery. A group of monks sitting around a
white plastic table greeted him warmly. After some small talk and a few
sips of cardamom coffee, a frail, bearded man led him upstairs into a
dusty room. Waiting in wooden cabinets were rows of priceless
manuscripts dating back to the sixth century.
Stewart carefully
opened one manuscript, lingering over the elegant calligraphy of its
yellowed pages. It was written in Syriac, an ancient Middle Eastern
language. "Isn't it beautiful?" he said.
Many Syriac [Assyrian]
Christians have been persecuted and forced to flee their homes in Syria
and Iraq in recent years. Their manuscripts are one of the remaining
embodiments of their cultural identity. So, when Stewart approached the
monastery in 2011, the monks saw him as a chance to save their history.
"These
books were left by our Holy Fathers," explained Shimon Çan, the
65-year-old librarian, calligrapher, and amanuensis of St. Mark's, and
one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the digitization project. "It
is our duty to open these treasures to the world and let our youngsters
understand the wisdom they exude."
Dealing continuously with the
worries of such endangered communities can be emotionally draining. By
sunset, Stewart's energy was starting to wane. "I am almost 60 and I
won't be doing this when I will be 70," he told me.
Under
Stewart's direction, HMML has expanded its activities to India, where it
recently photographed 10,000 palm-leaf manuscripts, and to Ethiopia,
where it digitized the Garima Gospels, believed to be the oldest
surviving Ethiopian manuscripts. The organization has also worked in
Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey, photographing
thousands of manuscripts of all confessions and languages, from Coptic
to Maronite and from Greek to Latin.
In 2013, the organization
decided to start digitizing Islamic material as well. In Mali, HMML is
currently digitizing more than 300,000 Islamic manuscripts, which risked
being destroyed when Islamists associated with al-Qaeda took over the
city of Timbuktu in 2012.
With the rise of ISIS, 2,000 out of the
6,000 manuscripts that HMML managed to digitize in Iraq between 2009 and
2014 have been lost or destroyed. Other manuscripts digitized in Syria
may have suffered the same fate.
"I try not to think about that,
because if I do I get really upset," Stewart said. "But it would be more
painful if I heard of something that was destroyed that we didn't
photograph, because that would be totally lost."
While making
digital surrogates of manuscripts can be fairly easy, preserving the
originals from physical deterioration is a whole different matter.
Because old pages are vulnerable to mold, worms, and insects,
manuscripts have to be wrapped and stored in acid-free papers and
cartons, sometimes in a climatized environment free of excessive
humidity. Once a manuscript becomes seriously damaged, restoring it is a
costly process.
"We recently spent $70,000 to restore around 100
manuscripts," lamented Khader Salameh, the septuagenarian librarian of
the al-Khalidi Library in Jerusalem, where a collection of 1,200
Islamic, Ottoman, and Persian manuscripts is currently being digitized
by HMML. The works span the gamut from medicine to astronomy, from
Quranic exegesis to philosophy and poetry. The oldest manuscript, a text
on early Islamic history, dates back to the 10th century.
"Although
most of the manuscripts are connected with the Islamic religion, they
also make you also understand the culture of the society at the time
they were written," Salameh said. "These works do not belong only to
Arabs, Muslims or Palestinians. They are a heritage for everyone in the
world."
Stewart, whose ultimate goal is to create the single most
comprehensive collection of digitized manuscript material, knows that
the main beneficiaries will be scholars. But he also hopes that the
collection can contribute to a better understanding between Christians
and Muslims.
"If we don't find deeper affinities, we will always
be stuck on our superficial differences. We will remain afraid and
suspicious of each other," Stewart said. "Relations were not always easy
in the past, but if we learn from places where they lived together, we
might learn how to live together."