LAST month, when a moderate Sunni Muslim figure, ex-minister Mohamed Chateh, was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut, some Middle East-watchers detected a "Sarajevo moment" for Lebanon. In other words, a single violent event that could be a step on the road to a broader conflict across the region, or even beyond it—just as the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital, a century ago, started a chain reaction that led to the first world war. An exaggerated comparison? It did at least seem true that the killing of Chateh—a critic of the Syrian regime and its Lebanese allies, the Shia fighters of Hezbollah—on December 27th marked a new twist in the contest between Sunnis, Shias and their respective allies and sponsors, even though Syria and Hezbollah denied responsibility.
Anyway, in a rather different and more literal sense, you might say Lebanon had a Sarajevo moment last Friday night. In the north Lebanese city of Tripoli, a library belonging to an Orthodox Christian priest, containing over 80,000 books and manuscripts, was set ablaze and two-thirds of the contents were destroyed. What triggered the act of arson was the alleged "discovery...of a pamphlet inside one of the books at the library that was insulting to Islam and the prophet Muhammed," according to an AFP report. The library's steward, Father Ibrahim Sarrrouj, is a locally respected figure who enjoys good relations with the town's Muslim leaders. He had convinced them that he was nothing to do with the pamphlet, and had managed to negotiate the cancellation of a proposed demonstration against the library, which includes Islamic texts. But at least one fanatic with a match proved impossible to stop. Tension in Tripoli has been running high because the port is a stronghold of Sunni Islam with a minority of Alawites, practising the same faith as Syria's ruling elite. But Father Ibrahim has been one of the city's peacemakers and he has continued calling for restraint even after losing his treasures.
For people who care about ancient book collections that tell a rich cultural story, the act of arson immediately recalled an even greater assault on the written heritage of a cosmopolitan city: the destruction of the Sarajevo library in August 1992. The Moorish-revival structure, built in the 1890s, had housed more than 1.5m volumes, including at least 155,000 rare books and manuscripts. They were an important legacy of the region's Christian, Muslim and Jewish heritage. The great majority of the contents was destroyed when the building was pounded with incendiary grenades, but librarians and ordinary citizens braved sniper fire to form a human chain to pass books out of the smouldering building. One librarian was killed. Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-born writer who now lives in America, believes the shelling of the library was ordered by his old literature professor, Nikola Koljevic, a Shakespeare scholar who horrified his students by joining the leadership of the hard-line Bosnian Serbs who were besieging the city. A troubled and conflicted figure, Koljevic committed suicide in 1997.
In all these ghastly situations, there are inspiring moments as well as horrifying ones. In Sarajevo, members of the library staff—Serbs and Croats as well as Muslims—worked on through the siege to catalogue the material they had salvaged. A new Sarajevo library is supposed to open this year, although some of its employees have had to work without pay recently because inter-ethnic squabbles have left them without a budget.
In the Lebanese port, one mildly encouraging thing is that on Saturday, hundreds of local Muslims staged a demonstration against the act of arson committed the previous night, with banners like "Tripoli, peaceful town" and "This is contrary to the values of the prophet Muhammed". The enemies of co-existence (whether their target is present-day symbiosis or the evidence of it in centuries past) never have things entirely to themselves.