Jahiliyyah.

This is coolbert:

From a very recent blog entry:

"To what extent these jihadi in Mali are Salafist I am not sure. And to what extent there was religious motivation for the torching of the archives and manuscripts I also cannot say."

That collection of ancient manuscripts and documents, archives as stored in Timbuktu, the arson a portion of which by those retreating jihadists in Mali has aroused the ire of learned scholars!

There DOES seem to have been  a religious motivation for the burning of the collection to the extent it was done. From an acknowledged authority on the subject:

"Destruction of jahiliyya"

"Jahiliyyah ("ignorance") is an Islamic concept of 'ignorance of divine guidance' or 'the state of ignorance of the guidance from God' or 'Days of Ignorance' referring to the condition in which Arabs found themselves in pre-Islamic Arabia, i.e. prior to the revelation of the Quran to Muhammad . . . it has come to refer to the state of anyone not following Islam and the Quran."

"more recently its meaning has been expanded to mean Western non-Muslims"

Those scholars in residence and the students at the medieval university not in consonance with the beliefs of the Salafists. Salafists those Muslims attempting to emulate to the greatest extent possible the ancient way as practiced by the first three generations of Islam as beginning with Mohammad and his initial group of followers.

Those manuscripts, archives, texts, the entire collection is jahiliyya? And in the modern context whatever is found to be pleasing and of interest to the non-Muslim also to the Salafist by definition is verboten, forbidden and jahiliyya!

coolbert.