In March 2004, I sat in the refurbished office of Ms. Juwan Mahmoud, the Chief Librarian of the Iraqi Academy of Sciences (in Arabic, al-majma' al-ilmi) in the Al-Waziriyya section of Baghdad. The Iraqi Academy had been looted of its first-rate collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and other languages immediately after the war. When I had first met Juwan, it was in the ruins of the library. I remember the rooms piled high with trashed documents and manuscripts haphazardly strewn around the place, and rows upon rows of gutted library shelves. I had gone to Baghdad in June 2003 with three colleagues – Jens Hanssen, Edouard Méténier and Keith Watenpaugh – to investigate the burning and pillaging of university and research libraries. One member of the group, Jens Hanssen, made a short documentary of the wrecked library premises, in which Juwan played a starring role. In the spirit of an Iraqi passionara, she forcefully called upon the conscience of the world to restore the Iraqi Academy's collections immediately.