THE BOOKS are burning again in Afghanistan. The literary repression is not on the same scale as the destruction under the Taleban, but as the fundamentalists fight back the war on words and knowledge is rekindling: schools are being torched, there is increasing local pressure by Islamic extremists to prevent the education of Afghan women, and old fears are resurgent.

Meanwhile, books from the West are pouring into both Afghanistan and Iraq, to fill the intellectual void left by years of propaganda, disinformation and booklessness. The battle of the books is a second front in the new global conflict.

Biblioclasm — the calculated destruction of books — has long been the autocrat’s favourite weapon. As Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” That is why so many dictators have “written” books and imposed them on victim-subjects as gospel. Inside every gorged dictator is a slim volume: Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler. The official 1936 posters for German Book Week featured a quote by the book-burner-in-chief: “I read insatiably and fundamentally,” said Hitler. The Nazis went on to burn 100 million volumes. Saddam Hussein churned out half a dozen works of autohagiography disguised as fiction.

For the Taleban there was, and is, only one book. In a single incident in 1998 some 55,000 volumes were burnt. But in this, the Taleban was following totalitarian tradition down the ages: control the literature and you control past, present and future.

The Spanish invaders of Mexico in 1562 systematically destroyed Mayan hieroglyphic books, wiping out an entire literary civilization to make way for Christianity. Chinese troops wrecked the Tibetan libraries; Sinhalese nationalists destroyed the Tamil Library in Sri Lanka; the Khmer Rouge torched most of Cambodia’s ancient manuscripts. A mark on the bridge of the nose, the telltale sign of spectacle-wearing and therefore of illicit reading, merited a Khmer Rouge death sentence. From literary to general artistic oppression is a short step: Chinese Red Guards destroyed thousands of pianos during the Cultural Revolution.

Books are power. The founding of the great library at Alexandria in the 3rd century BC was done for reasons of politics as much as scholarship, for the Ptolemies were acutely aware of the strategic implications in monopolising literary knowledge. Caliph Omar, by contrast, is accused of taking the Taleban line after Muslims conquered Alexandria in 641 AD. When asked what to do with the books, he replied: “If what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore.” According to legend, the scrolls fuelled the furnaces of the city’s bath-houses for six months.

Book burning has always been shorthand for intellectual terrorism: kill a man, and you take his life; kill his books, and you take his cultural meaning for all posterity. The Romans called it damnatio memoriae, the eradication of all records of existence, the ultimate sanction. When the Germans set fire to the library at Louvain in 1914, destroying 300,000 priceless manuscripts, this was not simple barbarism but the policy of Shrecklichkeit, organised horror. It is said that when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 they used the city’s magnificent library to build a bridge across the Tigris; for days the waters ran black with ink.

But literature always fights back. In his new book A Splendour of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, Nicholas Basbanes quotes the writer Alberto Manguel: “Trust in the survival of the word, as well as the urge to destroy it, is as old as the first clay tablets.” A few Mayan texts somehow survived to tell their story. In the concentration camps and ghettos, the condemned scribbled their testaments on secret scraps. “A handful of our friends kept pencil in hand to write about what was happening,” wrote Emmanuel Ringelbaum, who organised the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. “The work was holy for us.”

IN AFGHANISTAN, the waves of word-destruction over the past 25 years have been so extreme that one can only marvel that literacy, let alone literature, survived at all. But they did. Shah Mohammed Rais, a bookseller from Kabul, risked his life to protect the written word: his books were burnt, in turn, by Soviet censors, Mujahideen vandals and the Islamic fundamentalists. The Taleban thought police made a pyre of his innocent postcards and encyclopaedias.

After the fall of the Taleban this hero of literature allowed a Norwegian journalist, Asne Seierstad, to write about him and his family. She depicted a patriarchal, traditionalist tyrant, who kept his sons out of school, treated his younger sister as a slave and denied his family basic human rights. In this single individual the contradictory pressures on Afghanistan were distilled: a rigid conformity to a medieval way of thinking, coupled with staunch advocacy of literary freedom. Seierstad ’s book, The Bookseller of Kabul, has been translated into 17 languages, but Rais is now suing her for defamation: the man jailed for selling banned books wants this one pulped.

Afghan schools like those set up by CARE International, which is supported by The Times Christmas Charity Appeal this year, are slowly rolling back decades of literary tyranny. Like the War on Terror, the war for books in Afghanistan and Iraq will not be won easily. Yet thanks to the internet, books are not quite the perishable commodities they once were. Bibliophobia has always kept the tyrant awake at night; the advent of the flame-proof digital book means that he will never sleep well again.

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