While I certainly don't want to let any religion off the hook for destroying knowledge, I'm skeptical of the claim that Muslims destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria.
It doesn't help that almost everything we know about that event is incomplete, contradictory and generally written long after the fact. And often written by people with their own religio-political axes to grind.
Why I doubt it:
1. The Muslim conqueror of Alexandria in 642 CE, Amr ibn al `Aas, supposedly wrote to a Caliph Omar about the Great Library and got the reply - "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them."
That same story, using almost exactly the same words, is told about a "Caliph Omar" concerning the Muslim invasion of Iran and the destruction of its libraries. Very suspicious, to me anyway. I have to wonder which account is true, if either. Maybe propagandists for...Certain Other Religions made up both of them. We do have to remember that the keepers of libraries for about a thousand years were Xian monks...with plenty of motive and opportunity to do some selective editing:
Ibn Khaldun, in the chapter “On the Rational Sciences and their Kinds” (al-`ulum al-‘aqliyyah wa asnafuha) of his Muqaddimah, says: “At the time of the conquest of Iran many books of that country fell into the hands of the Arabs. Sa’d ibn Abi al-Waqqas wrote to `Umar ibn al-Khattab asking his permission to have them translated for Muslims. ‘Umar wrote to him in reply that he should cast them into water, “for if what is written in those books is guidance, God has given us a better guide; and if that which is in those books is misleading, God has saved us from their evil.” Accordingly those books were cast into water or fire, and the sciences of the Iranians that were contained in them were destroyed and did not reach us.
Good scholarly article where I found that quote:
http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2010/09/11/bar-hebraeus-abd-al-latif-and-the-destruction-of-the-library-of-alexandria/
2. Stories about Muslims destroying the Library all seem to have been written several centuries after the event, and mostly by early Xian writers.
3. Both Muslim and Xian writers like to point the finger at Julius Caesar for accidentally burning the Great Library. I'm very skeptical of that too. Caesar himself (or his ghostwriter Col. Hertius) wrote about that incident in
The Alexandrian Wars. Caesar set fire to ships of the Egyptian Navy, tied up in Alexandria's Western Harbor. The fires spread to warehouses near the docks. Those warehouses probably held copies of scrolls already in the Library.
One way we know for sure that Caesar's fire didn't "destroy the Great Library" - people were still visiting the Library and writing about it for many years after that battle.
4. The one event that probably did the most damage to the Library is seldom mentioned - a massive tsunami that hit Alexandria on July 26, 365 CE. Just like Indonesia in 2004, Alexandria was clobbered with a wall of water that drove boats on top of 2-story buildings and changed its entire coastline.
The tsunami apparently hit hardest in the area containing the royal palace complex - which included the Great Library. The palaces and the Library would have been mostly underwater after that, and the passing years submerged that part of Alexandria even further into the sea. Archeologists didn't start uncovering the underwater ruins of the palace complex until 1995.
After the tsunami, the Library was apparently moved to a "daughter library" located in the Serapeum - the massive temple to the recently invented god Serapis. (Represented as a Greek guy with a bowl of corn on his head. Now what kind of deity is that? Certainly not a patch on Anubis, Osiris or Bastet...)
5. Then 26 years later, the event that finished off whatever was left of the Library (and one Xians are still trying to weasel out of) - the order from Coptic Christian Pope Theophilus in 391 CE to destroy all the pagan temples in Alexandria. The biggest pagan temple was the Serapeum, so it was gone. Along with everything inside it, I'd guess.
Worthless Personal Anecdote - I visited the Serapeum's underground ruins many times when I lived in Alexandria from 2005-09. There's STILL evidence of a library being there - niches in the wall where scrolls were stored, and a huge marble table. What we'd call a "conference table" today, I guess.
The Wiki article about Theophilus' tantrum contains this interesting note. Which seems like a good place to stop before I write my own frigging library in this single post:
What a dick...
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