At some point after the coup in Turkey (summer of 2016), a Islamic scholar at Frankfurt University....got some kind of invitation to take up Islamic studies in Turkey. The guy? Fuat Sezgin.
Fuat Sezgin had been at the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Sciences at the Goethe University since early 1980s.
In the time that he'd been there.....he'd been responsible for helping the university acquire almost 20,000 Islamic journals and books. It was one of the larger collections in Europe.
Well....Sezgin felt that the collection was personal property....NOT university property.
Sezgin attempted to pack up the entire collection and send it to Turkey....with the customs folks at the Frankfurt Flughafen intercepting the collection.
This drew into court activity and today....the court said that the collection is not personal property...it's a cultural collection, to be held by the German university system.
It's one of those odd episodes where you have to wonder what Turkey's prime plan was for the collection.
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