The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  The city was filled with notable savants, but one figure stood far above the rest: Ahmed Baba Al Massufi Al Timbukti, an eccentric black polymath, born in the salt-mining oasis of Araouan in the deep Sahara in 1556, known for his brilliant mind and his lugubrious appearance. Ahmed Baba wore black eye shadow and dressed entirely in black. Nicknamed “As Sudani,” or “The Black One,” and often referred to by his admiring colleagues as “The Unique Pearl of His Time,” he composed sixty books for the University of Sankoré’s library—an unparalleled outpouring of astronomical treatises (one written entirely in verse), commentaries on the Koran and the Hadith, and a vast biographical dictionary of Islamic savants belonging to North Africa’s Maliki Sufi sect.

  In one work, On the Lawfulness of Tobacco Usage, he pondered the ethics of smoking, writing in response to a religious movement in Timbuktu that favored banning the habit. Ahmed Baba determined, perhaps influenced by commercial considerations, that tobacco was neither stimulating nor addictive, and therefore acceptable in the realm. In another, he proposed methods of conflict resolution, arguing for dialogue, forgiveness, and tolerance. His most famous manuscript, Ahmed Baba Answers a Moroccan’s Questions About Slavery, otherwise known as The Ladders of Ascent, argued that freedom is a fundamental right of human beings, except under rare conditions governed by Islamic law. In such cases, the scholar urged compassion and empathy: “God orders that slaves must be treated with humanity, whether they are black or not,” he wrote. “One must pity their sad luck, and spare them bad treatment, since just the fact of becoming an owner of another person bruises the heart, because servitude is inseparable from the idea of violence and domination, especially when it relates to a slave taken far away from his country.”

  In only one respect was the Golden Age of Timbuktu blighted by regressive thinking: the prevailing attitude toward the Jews. Thousands of them had settled in the Maghreb after their expulsion from Palestine by the Romans in the first century CE. By the fifteenth century, despite the entrenchment of Islam throughout the region, the Jews had gained a share of the salt trade, earned the privileged designation Tujjar Al Sultan, or the Sultan’s Merchants, by the rulers of Morocco, and even produced some of the region’s most splendid manuscripts, written in Hebrew. But the fragility of their status was made terribly clear in 1495. That year, a Maghrebi fundamentalist scholar, cleric, and vicious anti-Semite named Muhammed Al Maghili, incensed by their prominent economic role, organized the destruction of a synagogue in the oasis of Touat on the Saharan salt route, in what is now Algeria, and expelled the Jews from the town. “Rise up and kill the Jews,” Al Maghili wrote after the attack, just as King Askia Mohammed was consolidating power. “They are indeed the bitterest of enemies who reject Mohammed.” Askia Mohammed had been influenced early in his reign by a moderate Egyptian scholar he had met during a stopover in Cairo on the way to the hajj in Mecca, and who had urged the emperor to tolerate non-Muslims in his realm. But the king reversed course following his encounters with the fiery Al Maghili. Heeding Al Maghili’s counsel, Askia Mohammed imprisoned the Jews of Gao, the administrative seat of the Songhai Empire, and banned them from the rest of his domain. He backed down only when a delegation of qadis from Timbuktu visited him in his palace in Gao—a sprawling, palisade-enclosed complex where visitors were obliged to pour dust on their heads before meeting the king—and pleaded with him to exercise compassion.

  The confrontation between these two Islamic ideologies—one open and tolerant, the other inflexible and violent—would bedevil Timbuktu over the following five centuries. In the case of King Askia Mohammed, a complex figure who encouraged a balance between secular and Islamic values, while expressing his intolerance toward non-Muslim peoples, both strains seemed embodied in a single personality. “The King is an inveterate enemy of the Jews,” observed Leo Africanus. “He does not wish any to live in his town. If he hears it said that a Barbary merchant . . . does business with them, he confiscates his goods.”

  Eighty-two years after Leo Africanus documented Timbuktu’s intellectual ferment, in 1591, the golden era abruptly ended. The Moroccan sultan demanded that the last independent king of the Songhai Empire, Askia Ishak II, surrender control to Morocco of the great Saharan salt mines of Taghaza. When the king refused, 42,000 Moroccan soldiers and 10,000 horses and camels crossed 1,700 miles of desert and laid siege to Timbuktu. Armed with cannons and harquebuses, a powerful matchlock gun invented in the fifteenth century that was fired from a support, the invaders faced a force that knew nothing about mechanized warfare: 10,000 Songhai infantrymen fighting with only bows and arrows and 18,000 spear-carrying cavalrymen. King Askia Ishak II was killed while fleeing. His brother succeeded him and pledged his fealty to the Moroccan sultan.

  Ahmed Baba and other scholars urged the population to resist the occupiers. In retaliation, Moroccan troops stormed the Sankoré Mosque, looted Ahmed Baba’s library, and dragged him in chains into captivity. “Why did you conquer Timbuktu?” he demanded as they led him and dozens of other Timbuktu scholars on the arduous journey across the desert, during which his chains became entangled and he broke his leg in a fall from a camel. “We are Muslims like you, and we should be brothers.” Ushered into a meeting with the Moroccan sultan, he bitterly complained about the loss of his precious manuscripts. “I had the smallest library of many of my friends,” he said, refusing to make declarations of obeisance or otherwise show humility before the king, “and your soldiers took from me 1,600 volumes.” He would be imprisoned in Marrakesh for two years. Other intellectuals dispersed to the Volta River basin, Ghana, and northern Côte d’Ivoire—ending Timbuktu’s days as a world capital of scholasticism.

  Yet the city’s devotion to scholarship never disappeared. After the Moroccan Empire abandoned direct rule over Timbuktu in 1660, control of the city initially fell to the Tuaregs, the Berber tribe that dominated the Sahara. Tall, light-skinned raiders swathed in indigo robes, their faces covered with a five-foot length of blue or white cotton wound around their heads so that only their eyes were exposed, they “are all wanderers in the Sahara, nomads with no settled dwelling,” observed the author of the Tariq Al Sudan in the mid-seventeenth century. They also were a literate people, and some manuscripts of Timbuktu are written in Tifinagh, a two-thousand-year-old script developed by the Berbers that spread through the Sahara; one group of Tuareg marabouts, or knowledge men, the Kel Al Süq, maintained the city’s scholarly traditions during the centuries of decline that followed the Moroccan occupation.

  In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Sufi reformers from the Inland Niger River Delta led a “jihad of the sword” that reached as far as Timbuktu. The jihadis killed pagan chieftains, banned tobacco, alcohol, and music, opened madrassahs, or Koranic schools, required the full segregation of women and men in school and public life, forced the closure of the Great Mud Mosque of Djenné based on a strict interpretation of Islamic prohibitions against ostentation, and tracked down and destroyed manuscripts considered to be a distraction from the pure worship of God. The extremists pillaged Timbuktu’s libraries and raided private homes for books as well.

  The jihadis made the city’s bibliophiles more careful, but didn’t dissuade them from trading and collecting manuscripts. The German explorer Heinrich Barth reached Timbuktu in 1853, following an arduous Saharan crossing. “All these people, who possess a small degree of learning, and pride themselves in writing a few phrases from the Koran, were extremely anxious to obtain some scraps of paper, and I was glad to be still enabled . . . to give away some trifling presents of this kind,” Barth wrote. The jihadis had depleted the manuscript collections, but the German admired a dog-eared copy of an Arabic translation of the works of Hippocrates and found a copy of the Tariq Al Sudan, the prized history of the Songhai Empire written in the 1650s. “I was so successful as to have an opportunity of perusing a complete history of the kingdom of Songhai, from the very dawn of historical records down to the year 1640 of our era,” he wrote in his memoir, Trav
els and Discoveries in North and Central Africa.

  Then, in 1879 French Sudan’s governor, Louis Faidherbe, proclaimed that the territory encompassing the Senegal and Niger Rivers would be “the foundations of a new India” that would stretch as far as the Red Sea. The French occupied Bamako, then a bustling slave-trading entrepôt, in 1883. On the 12th of February 1894, after a brutal desert march of five hundred miles and forty-nine days, a column led by Colonel Joseph Césaire Joffre occupied Timbuktu, built a fort, and ushered in the French colonial era in the Malian Sahara.

  Félix Dubois, a French journalist who showed up just after the military conquest, found it nearly impossible to persuade the city’s bibliophiles to show him their book collections. “They were afraid that I should practice the nefarious customs of the [jihadis],” he wrote in Timbuctoo the Mysterious. As he visited the homes of Timbuktu’s intelligentsia, his hosts gradually opened up. “Poetry and works of imagination are not lacking, nor compositions of a kind peculiar to Arabian literature,” he observed. “The historical and geographical works of Morocco, Tunis, and Egypt were well known in Timbuctoo (Ibn Batuta being often quoted), and the pure sciences were represented by books on astronomy and medicine.” Timbuktu’s bibliophiles remained committed to “searching with a real passion for volumes they did not possess, and making copies when they were too poor to buy what they wanted,” Dubois observed. “They would . . . collect from seven hundred to two thousand volumes; and . . . these bibliophiles experienced a real joy in sharing their most precious manuscripts.”

  However, as the French consolidated their control over the north, the days of open commerce and book exchanges ended. Soldiers and visiting scholars made off with manuscripts and took them home to France, where they ended up on display in university and government collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Three copies of the Tariq Al Sudan seized in Timbuktu were carted off to Paris, translated by Octave Houdas, and published in French editions in 1900. People hid manuscripts all over Mali. They placed them inside leather bags and buried them in holes in their courtyards and gardens, stashed them in abandoned caves in the desert, and sealed the doors of their libraries with mud to hide the treasures inside. Under the new colonial rulers, French became the primary language taught in Mali’s schools. As a result, several generations in Timbuktu and other towns in the region grew up without learning to speak Arabic, which doomed the works to irrelevance.

  The volumes of history, poetry, medicine, and astronomy once proudly displayed in libraries, markets, and homes became rare and then disappeared. The great writing tradition was almost completely forgotten. “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none,” the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper proclaimed in an interview with the BBC in 1963. “There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.”

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  Abdel Kader Haidara signed on as a prospector for the Ahmed Baba Institute in the fall of 1984. Mahmoud Zouber, the director, showed Haidara how to approach the manuscript owners, and how to encourage them. The most important thing, Zouber said, was to avoid mentioning the Ahmed Baba Institute at first, because, after the trauma of the French occupation, people were still deeply afraid of organizations affiliated with the government. “Say you’re the son of Mamma Haidara, the illustrious scholar,” Zouber advised. “You have to bring up the manuscripts gradually,” he went on. “Don’t get them angry, don’t make them nervous. Use patience. You may have to go back several times.”

  One of Zouber’s longtime friends was John O. Hunwick, the world’s leading expert on Timbuktu’s literary heritage, as well as a scholar of the manuscript tradition in Egypt, Nigeria, and Ghana. At Zouber’s invitation, Hunwick set up camp in Timbuktu for a month and gave Haidara a crash course in manuscript history.

  Born in Somerset, England, in 1936, Hunwick had served with the British Army in Kenya during the Mau-Mau rebellion and with the Somaliland Scouts in Hargeisa, then mastered Arabic at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He had first encountered Timbuktu’s manuscripts while teaching in the mid-1960s at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, translated original manuscripts recounting the history of the Songhai Empire, and spent the next quarter century gathering information about the titles and locations of tens of thousands of Arabic manuscripts from Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Hunwick also created the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern University in Chicago, widely regarded as the foremost academic institution for Arabic manuscript study in the world.

  In Timbuktu, Hunwick and Haidara sat together for hours each day at the home of Zouber and in a conference room at the institute, discussing the provenances of manuscripts, preservation methods, and the best areas of Mali to prospect for the books. After his tutelage from Hunwick, Haidara attended UNESCO conservation workshops in Rabat, the Moroccan capital, and Bamako, and learned to assess the value of manuscripts by age, authorship, and design. The training course went on for eight months.

  Haidara began his search by knocking on the doors of the twelve most prominent families in Timbuktu, who had dominated book collecting in the region for centuries. Haidara introduced himself, made small talk, sometimes going back two or three times before gently broaching the subject of the manuscripts. The reaction was always the same. “You?” the owners responded dismissively, waving Haidara away. “Who do you think you are, mon petit?” they would say, mocking him for his youth and his inexperience and the less exalted position of his family in Timbuktu’s social hierarchy. “You have the nerve to talk to me about the manuscripts?” After a few weeks he gave up, having failed to persuade them to turn over more than a handful of manuscripts.

  Then he expanded his territory. On his maiden voyage beyond the city, Haidara headed down the Niger in a pinasse, a motorized and covered wooden longboat that was used to carry passengers and cargo. His destination was a town one hundred miles downriver, or east, from Timbuktu, called Gourma Rharous, an intellectual center at the height of the Songhai Empire. Haidara had met many people who spoke about the town in wondrous terms, as a meeting place for poets, scientists, and marabouts. The hereditary chief, Mohammed Al Hanafi, had been a friend of his father, and Haidara knew that the town had been a repository for manuscripts for centuries.

  The previous prospecting teams had roared into villages in two or three government Land Cruisers—an army of eight people carrying cameras, microfiche machines, and generators. Realizing that the onslaught intimidated villagers, Haidara traveled by himself, dressed humbly, and carried nothing but a small satchel. He had several thousand dollars hidden inside the bag for purchasing manuscripts, but reasoned—rightly, as it turned out—that his modest appearance would prevent him from becoming a target of bandits.

  The boatman motored the craft past beaches and low dunes, devoid of vegetation except for patches of desiccated grass and the occasional acacia tree—typical of the landscape along this stretch of the Niger River as it curved and flowed eastward through the semidesert of central Mali. Protected from the sun by a canvas roof mounted on the gunnels, Haidara passed the dugout canoes of Sorhai fishermen, known as Bozos, who dwelled in boxlike mud huts lined up against the olive-green water. “They form the sole population of these settlements and occupy distinct quarters in the towns and cities, thus emphasizing . . . that the Bosos still belong exclusively to the river,” wrote Félix Dubois, the French journalist and historian who traveled throught the area at the time of the French conquest, and who observed the riverine subculture during a 300-mile journey downstream from the colonial town of Ségou to Timbuktu in 1895. The scene witnessed by Dubois had changed little by the time Haidara made the journey. “I have seen them set out to the capture of their great prey (the alligator and the sea-cow),” Dubois went on. “Silently, almost without movement, they advance until the watchful eye in the bow discerns some alligator asleep on the tide,
or some great bearded fish dozing betwixt wind and water. Then the nude silhouette in the bow is strained by a beautiful movement of the free body, the right arm is poised, and the harpoon flung, striking the great beast unawares.”

  Arriving in Gourma Rharous after a journey of two days and one night, Haidara clambered onto the riverbank and searched through the sandy alleys for the hereditary chief. Haidara introduced himself as Mamma Haidara’s son to Al Hanafi. They drank tea together and he spent the night at Al Hanafi’s house. The following morning, over further cups of tea, he announced the real reason for his mission.