Interlude A: The Faithful Foes Who Saved Each Other's Texts

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"Sometimes, the ones who saved your scripture were the ones you called infidel."

In 9th-century Baghdad, under the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, an unlikely project was flourishing. In a sprawling center of learning known as Bayt al-Hikma (the House of Wisdom), Muslim scholars gathered texts from across the known world: Sanskrit treatises, Persian epics, Greek philosophy, and Christian theological works.

They didn't come merely to destroy or denounce. They came to translate, preserve, and debate.

Christian Nestorian scholars like Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq translated Galen and Aristotle from Syriac into Arabic. Jewish scholars contributed to astronomy and medicine. Muslim philosophers such as al-Kindī and later Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) used these texts to build bridges between revelation and reason.¹

These were not casual encounters. They were acts of intellectual faith—of believing that truth could pass between enemies.

Centuries later, in Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars cooperated again. In the Toledo School of Translators, Jewish intermediaries rendered Arabic texts into vernacular Spanish or Hebrew; Christian scholars then translated them into Latin. The Qur'an, once feared and banned in Europe, was preserved in part because Christian monks copied it to better understand—and refute—it. Ironically, that polemical motive ensured the survival of early Qur'anic manuscripts on European soil.²

Jews, meanwhile, preserved Arabic commentaries on Aristotle and Plato, many of which had passed through Islamic hands. Moses Maimonides wrote in Judeo-Arabic. His works were later studied by Christian scholastics like Thomas Aquinas. A faith's rival was often its librarian.

This pattern of preservation through supposed enemies extended far beyond the Abrahamic world. In medieval China, Buddhist monasteries preserved Confucian classics during periods of political upheaval, while Confucian scholars maintained Buddhist and Daoist texts when those traditions faced suppression. When Mongol invasions threatened to destroy Chinese literary culture entirely, it was often Buddhist monks—members of a "foreign" religion—who hid and copied classical Chinese texts.³

In India, Muslim rulers and scholars, even while destroying some Hindu temples, often patronized Sanskrit learning and preserved Hindu astronomical and mathematical texts that proved useful for administration and scholarship. The Mughal emperor Akbar commissioned translations of Hindu epics and Zoroastrian texts, seeing them as valuable sources of wisdom despite theological differences.⁴

In the Levant during the Crusades, some Christian knights destroyed Islamic libraries. But others protected them. In cities like Antioch and Jerusalem, Greek Orthodox Christians—caught between Crusaders and Muslims—often hid texts belonging to both sides. They understood that knowledge itself was more valuable than the particular hands that held it.

In Sicily, after its Norman reconquest, Arabic-speaking Christian administrators preserved Muslim legal and scientific texts well into the 12th century. These documents were not only tolerated—they were used to govern. The practical needs of administration overcame religious prejudice.⁵

During the Spanish Inquisition, some Morisco communities buried their Islamic manuscripts rather than burn them. But in cases documented by scholars like L.P. Harvey, sympathetic Christian neighbors helped hide or smuggle them—an echo of the Jewish Genizah principle: if it bears the name of God, let it not be destroyed.⁶

These patterns of cross-religious preservation often emerged from practical necessities. Islamic scholars needed Greek medical texts regardless of their pagan origins. Christian administrators required Arabic legal codes to govern diverse populations. Buddhist monasteries preserved Confucian classics because literacy itself was valuable, regardless of doctrinal differences.

But beyond pragmatism lay something deeper: the recognition that wisdom transcended the boundaries of particular faiths. Medieval scholars often distinguished between religious truth (specific to their tradition) and natural or philosophical truth (universal and discoverable by reason). This distinction allowed them to preserve and study texts from other traditions without compromising their own theological commitments.

In 2012, Islamist militants advanced on Timbuktu, threatening to burn its ancient manuscript libraries—some Islamic, some syncretic, some secular. In a quiet act of defiance, Muslim librarians and Christian aid workers worked together to smuggle 350,000 manuscripts out of the city. They hid them in rice sacks, canoes, and taxis, demonstrating that the impulse to preserve knowledge across religious lines continues today.⁷

In Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, Muslim and Christian citizens linked arms to protect the National Library, even as snipers fired on them. Thousands of manuscripts—Jewish, Islamic, Orthodox—were rescued by people who saw cultural memory as a common good transcending ethnic and religious divisions.

Today, interfaith digital initiatives continue this tradition. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) digitizes Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Yazidi manuscripts alike, seeing preservation as a universal human responsibility. In Jerusalem, institutions like the National Library of Israel collaborate with Palestinian scholars to preserve Arabic texts, recognizing that manuscript heritage belongs to all humanity.⁸

The Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library supports preservation projects worldwide, often bringing together scholars from different religious backgrounds to save manuscripts before they are lost to conflict, climate, or neglect. These modern efforts echo medieval patterns where preservation transcended religious boundaries.

Not every enemy became a friend. Religious wars did destroy countless texts, and theological hatred often triumphed over scholarly curiosity. But beneath the surface of conflict runs a quieter story: of scribes, librarians, translators, and neighbors who chose to preserve rather than erase.

Faith traditions were never sealed vaults. They breathed through shared hands. Some sacred texts exist today only because someone from another religion believed they were worth saving. The Corpus Aristotelicum reached medieval Europe through Islamic preservers. Sanskrit medical texts survived in Arabic translation when the original manuscripts were lost. Early Christian writings were copied by Muslim scribes in Egypt and Syria.

These stories reveal the fundamental porosity of religious boundaries when it comes to the preservation of knowledge. Religious communities that seemed locked in eternal conflict often collaborated quietly in the work of cultural transmission. The scribes and scholars who enabled this preservation understood something that their warrior contemporaries sometimes forgot: that the loss of knowledge impoverishes everyone, regardless of faith.

In our time of resurging religious nationalism and digital tribalism, these historical examples offer crucial lessons. They remind us that sacred memory is not property but trust. They demonstrate that preservation often requires cooperation across difference. And they suggest that sometimes, it is the so-called outsider who proves most worthy of guarding what we hold most precious.

The sacred texts that survive are not pure products of single traditions but hybrid inheritances, touched by many hands, preserved through unlikely alliances, and enriched by the very diversity that purists would eliminate. This is not a weakness of religious tradition—it is its greatest strength.

Notes

Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society (London: Routledge, 1998), 53-96. The activities at Bayt al-Hikma are well-documented in Arabic biographical dictionaries and bibliographical works.
Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 22-40.
Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 89-112.
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 156-178.
Jeremy Johns, "Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily," in The Administration of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, ed. Graham A. Loud and Alex Metcalfe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 57-92.
L.P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 234-267.
Charlie English, The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu (London: William Collins, 2017), 145-210.
For contemporary preservation efforts, see Columba Stewart, "Preserving Manuscripts, Preserving Memory," First Things, March 2014; and the National Library of Israel's collaborative projects at web.nli.org.il.

Notes

Further Reading