La Biblioteca La Pira

The change in the religious climate is the great cultural shift of which we are all witnesses, although we may not be aware of this. This shift is due to ignorance and has made room for devastating intellectual simplifications which have created a profound sequence of fundamentalism and terrorism. Just like the solutions found for climate change, in this case, too, knowledge is a necessary resource. This need for knowledge has promoted the initiative on the part of the Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII to set up an extensive library devoted to the histories and the doctrines of Islams. This library, which is intended to be located in Palermo but also twinned with the Dossetti Library in Bologna, one of the largest libraries dedicated to the history of Christianity and religious sciences in the world, aims to place a specialist research center, i.e. a knowledge factory, in the heart of the Mediterranean and aspires to become something unique in this field on a worldwide level.