Кітаптарды жою тарихы мен мәдениетке келтірген зияны

Practice of destroying, books or other written material

[[File:1933 may 10 berlin book burning. JPG|thumb|Nazi youth brigades burning "un German" works by Jewish and left wing authors at the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, 1933 Book burning can be an act of contempt for the book's contents or author, intended to draw wider public attention to this opposition, or conceal the information contained in the text from being made public, such as diaries or ledgers. Burning and other methods of destruction are together known as biblioclasm or libricide. In some cases, the destroyed works are irreplaceable and their burning constitutes a severe loss to cultural heritage. Examples include the burning of books and burying of scholars under China's Qin Dynasty (213–210 BCE), the destruction of the House of Wisdom during the Mongol siege of Baghdad (1258), the destruction of Aztec codices by Itzcoatl (1430s), the burning of Maya codices on the order of bishop Diego de Landa (1562), and the burning of Jaffna Public Library in Sri Lanka (1981).

thumb|alt=A graphical depiction of Jehoiakim burns Jeremiah's scroll.|King Jehoiakim burns Jeremiah's scroll. According to the Hebrew Bible, in the 7th century BCE, King Jehoiakim of Judah burned part of a scroll that Baruch ben Neriah had written at prophet Jeremiah's dictation (see Jeremiah 36).

In the New Testament's Acts of the Apostles, it is claimed that Paul performed an exorcism in Ephesus. After men in Ephesus failed to perform the same feat many gave up their "curious arts" and burned the books because apparently, they did not work. And many that believed, came and confessed and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. After the First Council of Nicea (325 CE), Roman emperor Constantine the Great issued an edict against nontrinitarian Arians which included a prescription for systematic book burning: "In addition, if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offense, he shall be submitted for capital punishment " According to Elaine Pagels, "In AD 367, Athanasius, the zealous bishop of Alexandria issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all such unacceptable writings, except for those he specifically listed as 'acceptable' even 'canonical'—a list that constitutes the present 'New Testament'". (Pagels cites Athanasius's Paschal letter (letter 39) for 367 CE, which prescribes a canon, but her citation "cleanse the church from every defilement" (page 177) does not explicitly appear in the Festal letter.) Heretical texts do not turn up as palimpsests, scraped clean and overwritten, as do many texts of Classical antiquity. According to author Rebecca Knuth, multitudes of early Christian texts have been as thoroughly "destroyed" as if they had been publicly burnt. In 1759 Pope Clement XIII decreed that all books written by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus should be burned.

Activity by Cyril of Alexandria ( 376–444) brought fire to almost all the writings of Nestorius (386–450) shortly after 435. 'The writings of Nestorius were originally very numerous', however, they were not part of the Nestorian or Oriental theological curriculum until the mid sixth century, unlike those of his teacher Theodore of Mopsuestia, and those of Diodorus of Tarsus, even then they were not key texts, so relatively few survive intact, cf. Baum, Wilhelm and Dietmar W. Winkler. 2003. The Church of the East: A Concise History. London: Routledge.

According to the Chronicle of Fredegar, Recared, King of the Visigoths (reigned 586–601) and first Catholic king of Spain, following his conversion to Catholicism in 587, ordered that all Arian books should be collected and burned; and all the books of Arian theology were reduced to ashes, along with the house in which they had been purposely collected. Which facts demonstrate that Constantine's edict on Arian works was not rigorously observed, as Arian writings or the theology based on them survived to be burned much later in Spain.

In 1244, as an outcome of the Disputation of Paris, twenty four carriage loads of Talmuds and other Jewish religious manuscripts were set on fire by French law officers in the streets of Paris.

During the Spanish colonization of the Americas, numerous books written by indigenous peoples were burned by the Spaniards. Several books written by the Aztecs were burnt by Spanish conquistadors and priests during the Spanish conquest of Yucatán. Despite opposition from Catholic friar Bartolomé de las Casas, numerous books found by the Spanish in Yucatán were burnt on the order of Bishop Diego de Landa in 1562. De Landa wrote on the incident that "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction".

The founding of the Church of England after King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church led to the targeting of English Catholics by Protestants. During the Tudor and Stuart periods, Protestant citizens loyal to the Crown attacked Catholic religious sites across England, frequently burning any religious texts they found. These acts were encouraged by the Crown, who pressured the general public to take part in such "spectacles". According to American historian David Cressy, over "the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries book burning developed from a rare to an occasional occurrence, relocated from an outdoor to an indoor procedure, and changed from a bureaucratic to a quasi theatrical performance". With the Bishops' Ban of 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered an end to the production of verse satire and the confiscation and the burning of specific extant works, including works by John Marston and Thomas Middleton. Nine books were specifically singled out for destruction. Scholars disagree about what properties these nine books have in common to cause official offence.

During the 18th century, the works of French philosopher and writer Voltaire were repeatedly burned by government officials in the kingdoms of France and Prussia. In 1734, the publication of his Lettres philosophiques in the city of Rouen led to a public outcry, as it was seen as an attack against the ancien régime of France. In response, the French authorities ordered copies of book to be publicly confiscated and burnt, and Voltaire was forced to flee Paris. In 1751, King of Prussia Frederick the Great ordered a pamphlet written by Voltaire titled Doctor Akakia to be publicly burnt as it insulted Pierre Louis Maupertuis, the president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, of whom Frederick was a significant patron.

Following John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, slaveholders and their supporters spread panic about abolitionism, believing that anti slavery conspiracies would lead to widespread slave revolts. Pro slavery southerners burned books in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, including textbooks from public schools. Books that were critical of slavery, or insufficiently supportive of it, were seen as "anti Southern" by the book burners.

Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, inscribed book burning on its seal, as a worthy goal to be achieved.

thumb|Thousands of books smoulder in a huge bonfire as Germans give the Nazi salute during the wave of book burnings that spread throughout Nazi Germany. The Nazi government decreed broad grounds for burning material "which acts subversively on Nazi Germany's future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of German people".

During the Allied occupation of Japan, GHQ officials banned any kind of criticism of the Allies or "reactionary" political ideas and many books were confiscated and burned. Over 7,000 books were destroyed.

In 1588, the exiled English Catholic William Cardinal Allen wrote "An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England", a work sharply attacking Queen Elizabeth I. It was to be published in Spanish occupied England in the event of the Spanish Armada succeeding in its invasion. Upon the defeat of the Armada, Allen carefully consigned his publication to the fire, and it is only known of through one of Elizabeth's spies, who had stolen a copy. Carlo Goldoni is known to have burned his first play, a tragedy called Amalasunta in the 1730s, when encountering unfavorable criticism. The Hassidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov is reported to have written a book which he himself burned in 1808. To this day, his followers mourn "The Burned Book" and seek in their Rabbi's surviving writings for clues as to what the lost volume contained and why it was destroyed. Nikolai Gogol burned the second half of his 1842 magnum opus Dead Souls, having come under the influence of a priest who persuaded him that his work was sinful; Gogol later described this as a mistake. As noted in Claire Tomalin's intensively researched "The Invisible Woman", Charles Dickens is known to have made a big bonfire of his letters and private papers, as well as asking friends and acquaintances to either return letters which he wrote to them or themselves destroy the letters – and most complied with his request in the 1850s and the 1860s. Dickens' purpose was to destroy evidence of his affair with the actress Nelly Ternan. To judge from surviving Dickens letters, the destroyed material – even if not intended for publication – might have had considerable literary merit. Martin Gardner, a well known expert on the work of Lewis Carroll, believes that Carroll had written an earlier version in the 1860s of Alice in Wonderland which he later destroyed after writing a more elaborate version which he presented to the child Alice who inspired the book. In the 1870s Tchaikovsky destroyed the full manuscript of his first opera, The Voyevoda. Decades later, during the Soviet period, The Voyevoda was posthumously reconstructed from surviving orchestral and vocal parts and the composer's sketches.

Alberto Santos Dumont, after being considered a spy by the French government in 1914 and then having this deception excused by the police, he destroyed all his aeronautical documents. The following year, according to the afterword to the historical novel "De gevleugelde," Arthur Japin says that when Dumont returned to Brazil, he "burned all his diaries, letters and drawings." After Hector Hugh Munro (better known by the pen name Saki) was killed in World War I in November 1916, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers. There is substantial evidence that Finnish composer Jean Sibelius worked on an Eighth Symphony. He promised the premiere of this symphony to Serge Koussevitzky in 1931 and 1932, and a London performance in 1933 under Basil Cameron was even advertised to the public. However, no such symphony was ever performed, and the only concrete evidence of the symphony's existence on paper is a 1933 bill for a fair copy of the first movement and short draft fragments first published and played in 2011. Sibelius had always been quite self critical; he remarked to his close friends, "If I cannot write a better symphony than my Seventh, then it shall be my last." Since no manuscript survives, sources consider it likely that Sibelius destroyed most traces of the score, probably in 1945, during which year he certainly consigned a great many papers to the flames. Aino, Sibelius' wife, recalled that "In the 1940s there was a great auto da fé at Ainola [where the Sibelius couple lived]. My husband collected a number of the manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the Karelia Suite were destroyed – I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out – and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw on to the fire. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood." It is assumed that a draft of Sibelius' Eighth Symphony which he worked on in the early 1930s but with which he was not satisfied was among the papers destroyed. Joe Shuster, who together with Jerry Siegel created the fictional superhero Superman, in 1938 burned the first Superman story when under the impression that it would not find a publisher. Axel Jensen made his debut as a novelist in Oslo in 1955 with the novel Dyretemmerens kors, but he later burned the remaining unsold copies of the book. In August 1963, when C. S. Lewis resigned from Magdalene College, Cambridge and his rooms there were being cleaned out, Lewis gave instructions to Douglas Gresham to destroy all his unfinished or incomplete fragments of manuscript which scholars researching Lewis' work regard as a grievous loss. In 1976 detractors of Venezuelan liberal writer Carlos Rangel publicly burned copies of his book From the Noble Savage to the Noble Revolutionary in the year of its publication at the Central University of Venezuela.

When Virgil died, he left instructions that his manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burnt, as it was a draft version with uncorrected faults and not a final version for release. However, this instruction was ignored. It is mainly to the Aeneid, published in this "imperfect" form, that Virgil owes his lasting fame – and it is considered one of the great masterpieces of classical literature as a whole. Before his death, Franz Kafka wrote to his friend and literary executor Max Brod: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread." Brod overrode Kafka's wishes, believing that Kafka had given these directions to him, specifically, because Kafka knew he would not honour them – Brod had told him as much. Had Brod carried out Kafka's instructions, virtually the whole of Kafka's work – except for a few short stories published in his lifetime – would have been lost forever. Most critics, at the time and up to the present, justify Brod's decision. In his foreword to Kafka's The Castle Brod noted that when entering Kafka's apartment after his death, he found several big empty folders and traces of burnt paper the manuscripts which were in these folders having evidently been destroyed by Kafka himself before his death. Brod expressed pain at the irreversible loss of this material and happiness at having saved so much of Kafka's work from its creator's ruthlessness. A similar case concerns the noted American poet Emily Dickinson, who died in 1886 and left to her sister Lavinia the instruction of burning all her papers. Lavinia Dickinson did burn almost all of her sister's correspondences, but interpreted the will as not including the forty notebooks and loose sheets, all filled with almost 1800 poems; these Lavinia saved and began to publish the poems that year. Had Lavinia Dickinson been more strict in carrying out her sister's will, all but a small handful of Emily Dickinson's poetic work would have been lost. In early 1964, several months after the death of C. S. Lewis, Lewis' literary executor Walter Hooper, rescued a 64 page manuscript from a bonfire of the author's writings – the burning carried out according to Lewis' will. In 1977, Hooper published it under the name The Dark Tower. It was apparently intended as part of Lewis' Space Trilogy. Though incomplete and evidently an early draft which Lewis abandoned, its publication aroused great interest and a continued discussion among Lewis fans and scholars researching his work.

Although the act of destroying books is condemned by the majority of the world's societies, book burning still occurs on a small or large scale.

In the Sikh religion, any copies of their sacred book, Guru Granth Sahib, which are too badly damaged to be used, and any printer's waste which bears any of its text, are cremated. This ritual is called an Agan Bhet, and it is similar to the ritual which is performed when a deceased Sikh is cremated.