After Tombs, Arabs Extremists Now Destroying Timbuktu’s Manuscripts

The city of Timbuktu in northern Mali is not only home to historic mosques and sacred tombs, but also an enormous collection of old manuscripts that illustrate the rich intellectual history of the region. All of this is now under threat from a wave of barbarism by salafists Arabs who have seized control of northern Mali.

European historians long claimed that Africa had no written history or intellectual tradition and that the first light of civilisation arrived there with the European colonisation. But if there is one city in Africa that dispels this White myth, it is Timbuktu.

Centre of intellectual life

This city on the northernmost part of the river Niger, at the edge of the Sahara, was a thriving centre of commerce from the 13th century. There, merchants traded in gold, salt and other commodities. Europeans first arrived to the city in the 19th century, but historians like explorer Ibn Battuta described the city with admiration some five hundred years earlier.

Timbuktu is best known for its historic mosques and mausoleums, where Sufi saints are entombed. But only recently did people realize that, aside from a centre of trade, the city was also a significant centre of intellectual life. In the late 1990s, an international research team found a number of private libraries where prominent families from Timbuktu kept tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts. Written in various African languages and Arabic, the manuscripts showed the world that 13th-century West African scholars were deeply engaged in the study of religious subjects but also logic, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and natural sciences.

The History of Timbuktu

Imagine a city in 16th century West Africa where thousands of Black African students pondered over the latest ideas in science, mathematics, and medicine. A fabled town in the middle of the scorching desert, overflowing with countless numbers of valuable books, expensive crafts, exquisite fabrics, and unrivalled gold jewellery! Imagine a community of highly cultured, wealthy people whose forbidden streets were the subject of legends and whose ochre walls were sought after by some of the greatest adventurers of the times.

From its grand mud structures which have stood the test of time and still fulfil their role as centres of prayer and learning, to the collections of scrolls and writings hidden in chests buried under the desert sands, Timbuktu is a treasure of African intellectual and spiritual History.

The story begins with a Tuareg woman named Buktu who founded a settlement in the 11th century, some 12 kilometres (eight miles) north of the Niger River flood-plain along the southern edge of the Sahara. It was a perfect resting place for the nomadic Tuareg who roamed the desert in the rainy season and were in need of a malaria-free base for their animals to graze during the scorching heat of the summer.

Buktu's camp had fresh water wells, and she would protect their heavy goods when they left the camp at the first rains. This small, seemingly insignificant campsite, known as "Tim-Buktu" or the well of Buktu became the cornerstone of a thriving, bustling city.

To an enlightened centre of learning

Timbuktu's skyline has always been dominated by its houses of worship. It is to the famous mosques that the old city with its triangular layout owes its different quarters. These adobe mosques have become famous throughout the world for their unique shapes and their long histories. In the northern quarter, at the apex of the triangle lies the Sankore Mosque with its pyramid shaped minaret laced with protruding wooden support beams. It was here that the Sankore University housed its thousands of students and produced some of the greatest scholars in Africa.

Timbuktu is a reminder of what we can achieve .Today, many of these great works have been unearthed from private collections and stored in documentation centres. The most famous is the Ahmed Baba Centre for Documentation which began its collection around 1970 through a UNESCO educational grant. Named after one of the greatest scholars in Timbuktu history, this centre has been chosen by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa as the focus of a major drive to preserve the manuscripts of Timbuktu and train Malians in modern art of archival science.

African History by Africa
Passage way in the mosque in Timbuktu

Timbuktu's history has come to us from a series of historical works or Tarikhs written from the mid 17th century through the 18th century. These well written Arabic treasures enable us to enter the African world of scholarship and deep intellectual thought.

Some of them were bound with beautiful leather binding and have stood the test of time. The most famous chronicle in this period was the Tarikh-as-Sudan, or the History of the Sudan, written in 1653 by Timbuktu's most illustrious historian 'Abd ar-Rahman as-Sa'di.
Timbuktu lives on The first non-Muslim to enter the city was the French explorer Rene Caille on April 20, 1828. He was disappointed at the state of the buildings of Timbuktu but noted that "apparently all of the population could read the Qur'an and even know it by heart." The golden age of Timbuktu had passed but the spirit of scholarship and piety still remained.

Timbuktu with its thousands of manuscripts and its deep legacy destroys racist notions of Black inferiority and educational backwardness. Timbuktu gives solid proof of a powerful African past and an unbroken chain of African scholarship. Timbuktu also brings out Islam's great legacy of development in Africa and its proper place in the annals of African achievement. It's well preserved lessons of spirituality and peace making may very well hold some of the answers to today's complex problems of war and never ending conflict.

Maybe the heat of the desert sands and the emptiness of its expanse can provide direction for the African Renaissance and even the whole human race.

Fundamentalist Salafism

Arab extremist savage destroying tombs in Timbuktu

West African Islam has been deeply influenced by Sufism, a branch of Islam that favours a metaphorical interpretation of the Qur’an and focuses on the spiritual development of the individual.

The Arabs who have now seized power in northern Mali are followers of a very different movement: fundamentalist Salafism from Saudi Arabia. Their brand of Islam has no historical roots in West Africa and it rejects Sufism.

It is the fundamentalist Islam imported from Saudi Arabia and its animosity towards Sufism that has led to the tragic destruction of irreplaceable symbols of West Africa’s cultural heritage. Arab Salafist have already destroyed at least three historical mausoleums and they say they intend to raze them all to the ground. Historic mosques and libraries with manuscripts are not safe from these barbarians either. The manuscripts would fetch a fortune on the black market. There is a risk that important testimonies of a rich African scholarly tradition will disappear forever while Africans worldwide sit idle and scared of a few hundred Arabs.