Iraq books safe at home of librarian

BASRA, Iraq -- Alia Muhammad Baker's house is full of books. There are books in stacks, books in the cupboards, books bundled into flour sacks like lumpy aid rations. Books fill an old refrigerator. Pull aside a window curtain, and there is no view, just more books.

There are English books, Arabic books and a Spanish-language Quran. There are manuscripts, some of them hundreds of years old, on the finer points of Arabic grammar and the art of telling time. There is a biography of the Prophet Muhammad from about 1300. All told, Baker says, the books number about 30,000. And then there are the periodicals.

As the British forces stormed Basra in early April, Baker, a 50- year-old librarian, spirited the volumes out of the city's Central Library, over a 7-foot wall, to the back room of a restaurant and later into trucks to carry them to her home.

Even friends and library employees have been enlisted as caretakers for the troves of books she rescued.

The books constitute about 70 percent -- all there was time to save -- of the library's collection. Nine days later, the library building was burned in a mysterious fire.

Before the war began, Baker asked permission from Basra's governor to move the books to safety, but he refused without explanation. As soon as the war started, government offices were moved into the library, and an anti-aircraft gun was placed on the roof.

Baker kept going to work, but in keeping with her private plan to protect the library's holdings, every evening she filled her car with books and quietly took them home.

On April 6, the day the British entered the city, the job took on a new urgency. At noon, Baker called and found that the government workers had left. The next morning, as artillery fire filled the air, she checked on the library.

First she called the restaurant next door, the Hamdan, and asked one of the owners, Anis Muhammad, for help. Muhammad, 49, enlisted his brothers and employees. Armful after armful of books were taken from the library, passed over the wall to waiting hands and stacked in the Hamdan's empty dining rooms.

Shopkeepers from across the street joined in. Then some of the neighbors began to help.

"The people who carried the books, not all of them were educated," said Hussein Muhammad al-Salem al-Zambqa, a shopkeeper. "Some of them could not write or could not read, but they knew they were precious books."

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