January 2013

There is something of a mystery, an historical debate, about who exactly
caused the burning of the great Library at Alexandria. There is, however, no
mystery about who torched the library in Timbuktu.

Some years back, while researching the Sandbook, I became
fascinated by the stories of the manuscripts of Timbuktu, many of them dating
back to the thirteenth century:

It is not only the dryness of the climate that preserves ancient
manuscripts—the desiccating properties of sand can do the same directly…
Timbuktu holds dramatic illustrations of this. From around a.d. 1300 to 1500,
the fabled city was a great seat of learning, with students and scholars coming
from far away to study, learn, and debate. But after its fall, many of its
archives became dispersed or lost. However, in recent years, following more
peaceful times in Mali, literally thousands of manuscripts have been recovered
from where they had been hidden, in caves or directly in the desert sand.

“More peaceful times in Mali” – how times do change. Back then, Mauritania,
Mali, the Festival of the Desert, were high on my bucket list of destinations, a
fine illustration of the foolishness of procrastination. And when I read in the
news this morning that the manuscript collections had been burned by the fleeing
“rebels,” I was ready to weep. I reached in vain for words that would properly
describe this act and the individuals who committed it, until I settled on
“obscene” and “evil,” words that apply to essentially all of the actions of these people.

As the culmination of decades of work, largely stimulated by UNESCO, and with
the collaboration of the Malian and South African Governments, the support of
the Ford Foundation, funding from Kuwait, and the expertise of the University of
Capetown, the Ahmed
Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research opened the doors of
its new building in 2009. It housed collections of literally priceless manuscripts and the
facilities and staff to finally document and preserve them. On Monday came the
news
that it had been destroyed.

However, at the time of writing, there is a glimmer of hope – not, perhaps, for the
facility but for the manuscripts. Time
magazine reports that, in anticipation of exactly what happened, a
significant number of them had been quietly removed and hidden; history
repeating itself, ironically:

In interviews with TIME on Monday, preservationists said that in a
large-scale rescue operation early last year, shortly before the militants
seized control of Timbuktu, thousands of manuscripts were hauled out of the
Ahmed Baba Institute to a safe house elsewhere. Realizing that the documents
might be prime targets for pillaging or vindictive attacks from Islamic
extremists, staff left behind just a small portion of them, perhaps out of
haste, but also to conceal the fact that the center had been deliberately
emptied.

Let us hope that this is true.

Update 2 February: grounds for optimism - it seems likely that the majority of the manuscripts were indeed removed and hidden safely. SIGNATURE

Originally published at: https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/2013/01/index.html