When Enemies Became Librarians: How Opposing Faiths Saved Each Other's Sacred Texts

Sometimes, the ones who saved your scripture were the ones you called infidel.

History loves its narratives of religious conflict—crusades and conquests, inquisitions and holy wars. But hidden beneath the familiar stories of theological warfare runs a quieter, more remarkable tale: of how supposed enemies repeatedly became the unlikely guardians of each other's most sacred texts.

While researching the Sacred Editors series, I discovered that some of the world's most precious religious manuscripts exist today not despite religious rivalry, but because of it. The very people deemed heretics, infidels, or pagans often proved to be the most dedicated preservers of traditions they officially opposed.

The House of Wisdom: Where Enemies Gathered Texts

In 9th-century Baghdad, under the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, an extraordinary project was flourishing. In the sprawling Bayt al-Hikma—the House of Wisdom—Muslim scholars gathered texts from across the known world: Sanskrit treatises, Persian epics, Greek philosophy, and Christian theological works.

They didn't come merely to destroy or denounce. They came to translate, preserve, and debate.

Christian Nestorian scholars like Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq translated Galen and Aristotle from Syriac into Arabic. Jewish scholars contributed to astronomy and medicine. Muslim philosophers such as al-Kindī and later Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) used these texts to build bridges between revelation and reason.

These were not casual encounters. They were acts of intellectual faith—of believing that truth could pass between enemies.

The practical impact was profound. During a period when many early Christian texts were being lost, ignored, or systematically destroyed in the Latin West due to canonical standardization and theological suspicion, Islamic scholars were copying them, commenting on them, and often protecting them—not because they accepted their theology, but because they valued knowledge ('ilm) itself as a reflection of divine truth.

The Irony of Polemical Preservation

Centuries later, in Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars cooperated again in the Toledo School of Translators. Jewish intermediaries rendered Arabic texts into vernacular Spanish or Hebrew; Christian scholars then translated them into Latin.

Most remarkably, the Qur'an—once feared and banned in Europe—was preserved in part because Christian monks copied it to better understand and refute it. The polemical motive ensured the survival of early Qur'anic manuscripts on European soil. As scholars now recognize, "the most effective polemics required the most careful preservation."

This pattern repeated throughout history. Islamic scholars preserved significant Christian materials, though their choices often reflected specific theological interests rather than comprehensive archival intentions. Texts like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of James survived primarily through Eastern Christian and Arabic manuscript traditions after being marginalized in Western Christianity.

Beyond the Abrahamic World

The preservation-through-opposition pattern extended far beyond Christianity and Islam. In medieval China, Buddhist monasteries preserved Confucian classics during periods of political upheaval, while Confucian scholars maintained Buddhist and Daoist texts when those traditions faced suppression. When Mongol invasions threatened to destroy Chinese literary culture entirely, it was often Buddhist monks—members of a "foreign" religion—who hid and copied classical Chinese texts.

In India, Muslim rulers and scholars, even while destroying some Hindu temples, often patronized Sanskrit learning and preserved Hindu astronomical and mathematical texts that proved useful for administration and scholarship. The Mughal emperor Akbar commissioned translations of Hindu epics and Zoroastrian texts, seeing them as valuable sources of wisdom despite theological differences.

During the Crusades, some Christian knights destroyed Islamic libraries, but others protected them. In cities like Antioch and Jerusalem, Greek Orthodox Christians—caught between Crusaders and Muslims—often hid texts belonging to both sides, understanding that knowledge itself was more valuable than the particular hands that held it.

The Complex Motivations

Why did supposed enemies become such effective librarians? The motivations were complex and varied:

Practical Necessity: Islamic scholars needed Greek medical texts regardless of their pagan origins. Christian administrators required Arabic legal codes to govern diverse populations. Buddhist monasteries preserved Confucian classics because literacy itself was valuable, regardless of doctrinal differences.

Intellectual Curiosity: Medieval scholars often distinguished between religious truth (specific to their tradition) and natural or philosophical truth (universal and discoverable by reason). This distinction allowed them to preserve and study texts from other traditions without compromising their own theological commitments.

Polemical Purposes: To effectively refute an opponent's beliefs, scholars needed detailed knowledge of their scriptures and doctrines. This led to careful study and copying of texts they theologically opposed.

Administrative Pragmatism: In Sicily after the Norman reconquest, Arabic-speaking Christian administrators preserved Muslim legal and scientific texts well into the 12th century because they needed these documents to govern effectively.

When Neighbors Became Guardians

Perhaps most moving are the individual acts of preservation that crossed religious lines during times of persecution. During the Spanish Inquisition, some Morisco communities buried their Islamic manuscripts rather than burn them. But documented cases show sympathetic Christian neighbors helped hide or smuggle them—echoing the Jewish Genizah principle: if it bears the name of God, let it not be destroyed.

These intimate acts of preservation reveal something profound about human nature: even in times of religious conflict, some people recognized that cultural memory transcended theological boundaries.

Modern Echoes of Ancient Patterns

This tradition of cross-religious preservation continues today. In 2012, when Islamist militants advanced on Timbuktu threatening to burn its ancient manuscript libraries, Muslim librarians and Christian aid workers collaborated to smuggle 350,000 manuscripts out of the city. They hid them in rice sacks, canoes, and taxis, demonstrating that the impulse to preserve knowledge across religious lines endures.

During the Bosnian war, Muslim and Christian citizens linked arms to protect Sarajevo's National Library, even as snipers fired on them. Thousands of manuscripts—Jewish, Islamic, Orthodox—were rescued by people who saw cultural memory as a common good transcending ethnic and religious divisions.

Today's interfaith digital initiatives continue this pattern. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library digitizes Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Yazidi manuscripts alike, seeing preservation as a universal human responsibility. In Jerusalem, institutions like the National Library of Israel collaborate with Palestinian scholars to preserve Arabic texts, recognizing that manuscript heritage belongs to all humanity.

The Porosity of Sacred Boundaries

These stories reveal a fundamental truth about religious traditions: they were never sealed vaults. They breathed through shared hands. Some sacred texts exist today only because someone from another religion believed they were worth saving.

The Corpus Aristotelicum reached medieval Europe through Islamic preservers. Sanskrit medical texts survived in Arabic translation when the original manuscripts were lost. Early Christian writings were copied by Muslim scribes in Egypt and Syria. Jewish scholars preserved Arabic commentaries on Aristotle and Plato. Moses Maimonides wrote in Judeo-Arabic, and his works were later studied by Christian scholastics like Thomas Aquinas.

A faith's rival was often its librarian.

Lessons for Our Digital Age

As we face new challenges in preserving religious heritage—from format obsolescence to political censorship to corporate platform failures—these historical patterns offer crucial insights.

First, diversity of preservation efforts strengthens overall resilience. No single institution, tradition, or technology can guarantee long-term survival. The texts that have endured did so because multiple communities, often with competing interests, found reasons to preserve them.

Second, intellectual curiosity and scholarly exchange often prove more effective at preservation than official institutional efforts. The casual copying by curious scholars, the careful study by theological opponents, the practical use by administrators—these informal networks of preservation frequently outlasted formal institutional commitments.

Third, preservation across religious boundaries requires recognizing that wisdom transcends particular traditions while respecting the sacred boundaries that give spiritual knowledge its power and meaning.

When Preservation Transcends Theology

The medieval scholars who preserved each other's texts understood something we sometimes forget: knowledge itself has value beyond the particular religious framework that produced it. They could distinguish between accepting a tradition's theological claims and recognizing its intellectual contributions.

This doesn't blur theological boundaries or suggest doctrinal equivalence. Rather, it highlights shared responsibility for preserving human religious heritage and the complex ways different communities have contributed to maintaining access to ancient wisdom traditions.

In our polarized world, these stories remind us that even supposed enemies can find common ground in the simple recognition that some things are too precious to let disappear—regardless of who originally wrote them or what we think of their theology.

The sacred texts that survived history's countless conflicts did so not only through the devotion of believers but through the curiosity of outsiders, the pragmatism of administrators, and the scholarly conscience of those who believed that truth was larger than any single tradition's claims upon it.

As we work to preserve religious heritage for future generations, we might remember that our most unlikely allies may be those who disagree with us most deeply—if we can find shared ground in the conviction that human spiritual seeking, in all its diversity, deserves to be remembered.

This post draws from research conducted for the Sacred Editors series, which examines how human decisions have shaped the survival and loss of sacred texts across cultures and millennia. The preservation of religious texts across theological boundaries reveals patterns that continue to inform contemporary approaches to cultural heritage and interfaith cooperation.