<Li> Al - Maqrizi (1364--1442) also mentions the story briefly, while speaking of the Serapeum . </Li> <P> The accounts of al - Qifti and Bar - Hebraeus are more detailed . They state that "John the Grammarian" asked Amr to spare the library, and Amr contacted the caliph Umar for authorization . Umar replied that if the books agreed with the Quran they were redundant, and if they did not, then they were forbidden . Amr handed the books over to Alexandria's heated bath houses, where they were burned as fuel for six months . This story was still in circulation among Copts in Egypt in the 1920s . Eutychius of Alexandria, who wrote a detailed account Amr's siege 200 years later, does not record the Arabs destroying a library . His description of the correspondence between Amr and Umar, regarding the fate of the city, contradicts al - Qifti's and Bar - Hebraeus's account; Amr did not mention a library, and Umar ordered everything spared . </P> <P> Edward Gibbon--who blamed Theophilus for the library's destruction in a heavily embellished account--rejected the Arab destruction thesis, citing Eusèbe Renaudot's History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria . Jean de Sismondi, Alfred J. Butler, Victor Chauvin, Paul Casanova, Gustave Le Bon and Eugenio Griffini did not accept the story either, and Roy MacLeod rejected it as well . Bernard Lewis speculated that Saladin could have promoted the myth to justify his destruction of the Fatimid Caliphate's collection of Isma'ilist texts after he restored Sunni Islam to Egypt . </P>

Who ordered the burning of the library of alexandria