“Those 4,000 were left behind in a library that had been occupied early on by the jihadist and turned into a military barracks,” Hammer says. In the end, this group of “bad-ass librarians,” as Hammer calls them, were able to save all but 4,000 manuscripts. Haidara relocated his operation further down the Niger River. At that point, had to switch gears entirely.” “The third and final stage came when the French military invaded, and the whole north became a warzone - you could no longer travel on the roads. “The next step was to actually get out of the safehouses in Timbuktu and smuggle them past jihadi checkpoints and down to Bamako, the capital of Mali,” says Hammer. When extremists moved to occupy Timbuktu four years ago, they imposed Sharia law and doled out cruel punishments on those that resisted - public executions were carried out regularly, individuals were stoned to death, and suspected adulterers were mutilated in public squares.īut that didn’t stop Haidara or those working with him - they moved forward with a plan to save these coveted texts, and risked their lives in the process. “The first stage was taking them in the middle of the night by flashlight out of these libraries, and stashing them inside private houses, where they remained for several months.” “It was an enormously complicated operation that had several stages,” he says. Then, in 2012, an unlikely coalition of Tuareg nationalists and Islamic extremists took over the city and threatened to destroy these priceless manuscriptsīut many brave men and women in Timbuktu were able to save 375,000 precious manuscripts from destruction, something Hammer chronicles in his book, " The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu." In 2011, the fall of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya prompted a flow of arms across the desert, and preachers of Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia set up shop in a new mosque in Timbuktu. The librarian wanted to ensure these invaluable volumes, some of which were buried in the desert, would last for hundreds more years. The people of Mali didn’t want to part with these precious treasures, so they hid away these prized manuscripts, and many were forgotten for decades.īut about 15 years ago, thanks to international funding from UNESCO and the efforts of Abdel Kader Haidara, a young man from the city, hundreds of thousands of these manuscripts were brought back to Timbuktu and preserved by teams of librarians in newly built facilities.Īs a young man, Haidara scoured the country, traveling on camel and by boat to convince the owners of these manuscripts to entrust them to him in exchange for livestock and cash. “The French colonial army invaded and conquered the north of Mali in the 19th century, and began seizing manuscripts where they could find them, taking them to museums in Paris and libraries in Paris.” “Books were produced there - manuscripts - at a huge rate, and then over the centuries were scattered,” Hammer says. Writing mostly in Arabic, the scholars that visited Timbuktu studied astronomy, medicine, poetry, and music and debated the details of Islamic law. “Mali, in that era - the golden era of the 15th and 16th centuries - was the center of a great North African empire, and Timbuktu was the cultural, economic and intellectual capital of that empire,” says author Joshua Hammer. Perched on the Niger River, Timbuktu was once a major stop on trade routes across North Africa and a coveted destination for scholars nearly 600 years ago.
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