Sidi Lamine gently opens the creaky wooden door that leads to his collection of manuscripts. Housed in a dark, windowless room, hundreds of medieval texts line handsome wooden bookshelves that reach to the ceiling. A musty smell lingers over everything. On an ornate table under dusty glass rest the rarest books in his collection, several of which he quietly mentions were written in 1010.
"I haven't visited this room in more than 10 months," he says, "because I was scared the Islamists would know that I have manuscripts like these, and they would destroy them. I thank God they are still OK."
Mr. Lamine, who says he's at least 70 years old and has been helping to preserve the texts since he was 10, recounts how Islamist militants took over this city recently, threatening the precious works. "Under the occupation," he says, "Islamists found families with manuscripts, and those manuscripts have not been seen since."
Enlarge ImageDaniel Seckman for The Chronicle
Sidi Lamine, a resident of Timbuktu, has helped care for the city's manuscripts since he was a child.
Enlarge ImageDaniel Seckman for The Chronicle
Mahmoud Mahamane Dedaou dit Hamou, the city's director of Islamic education, stresses the need to teach younger generations to care for the texts.
Enlarge ImageDaniel Seckman for The Chronicle
Islamist occupiers damaged the recently completed Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research.
Enlarge ImageDaniel Seckman for The Chronicle
As they left the city, the occupiers burned an estimated 300 manuscripts from the institute's library.
Today, as French warplanes circle overhead, Timbuktu is cautiously recovering from the Islamist occupation, which saw a city once acclaimed for its educational contributions to the world withdraw completely into itself, cut off from even neighboring cities. Muslim extremists, with the assistance of an Al Qaeda affiliate, invaded Timbuktu one year ago as part of a campaign to impose stringent Shariah law across the Sahel, a wide belt of land at the southern edge of the Sahara. Aided at the time by political turmoil inside the country, the extremists quickly conquered vast swathes of the north and east, practically unimpeded by the Malian army. Quite literally overnight, the very scholarly artifacts that made Timbuktu world-renowned needed to be hidden away and protected from the city's new rulers, who viewed them as heretical because of fears that they competed with the Koran for influence.
A place of narrow alleys and a population of 50,000 residents, Timbuktu made its mark on the medieval world as a center of Islamic learning, contributing to religious thought, science, and poetry. Lying near the Sahara in what is today northern Mali, traders, students, poets, and artists trekked to the city in large numbers from every corner of Africa and even the Middle East. During the 1500s, the city housed one of the largest universities in the world, with some 25,000 students.
Many of the documents held in public and private collections around the city hail from that time, regularly referred to as the city's "Golden Age." During the last 500 years, the manuscripts have been preserved quietly through deliberate efforts by local elders. They are often referred to by residents as "the soul and history of our city."
Local experts insist that these documents are much more than collections of writings. "They provide us with information about science, about religion, about the meaning of life, about our relationship with God, about nature, and about history," says Mahmoud Mahamane Dedaou dit Hamou, a manuscript expert and the director of Islamic education in Timbuktu. He has written several books on the texts and their history. "They are also in several different languages—Arabic, of course, but also Fulani, Sudanese, Farsi, and Songhay, which shows us even more information about what kind of place Timbuktu was in the past."
Throughout history, efforts to preserve the manuscripts have been simple and economical, if not entirely effective. Documents were carefully wrapped in cloth, placed in metal containers, and put in rooms with no sunlight. But insects and the heat—which reaches well over 100 degrees during parts of the year—have had their effect over the years. Manuscript owners would open these crates years later to discover that their contents had been ruined.
"When an insect eats even the corner of a page, or puts a tiny hole in the center of a manuscript, this not only decreases the manuscript's financial worth, but also can change the meaning of the document, perhaps losing the original message forever," says Mr. Hamou, who before last year's invasion by Islamic fundamentalists had traveled to France and Egypt to learn about how to preserve old manuscripts.
Over three-quarters of Timbuktu's manuscripts are still housed in private collections. Aware of this, Mr. Hamou says he has been stressing "for years" the need to educate younger generations, who will eventually inherit these collections, about manuscript preservation.
Efforts to preserve these documents received major help in 2009, with the opening of a new, modern building for the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, named after the 17th-century Timbuktu scholar Ahmed Baba Al-Massufi. The $7.5-million facility is dedicated entirely to cataloging, preserving, and digitizing Timbuktu's manuscripts. By the beginning of 2012, approximately 30,000 documents had been gathered into the elegant two-story library, and digitization had slowly begun. Air-conditioned facilities and guest rooms for visiting researchers round out the facility, which was completed with assistance from the French and South African governments, and private donors like the Ford Foundation.
Given the importance residents ascribe to these manuscripts, it's no surprise that as the fighting inched closer to the city in 2012, they leapt into action to save countless manuscripts. People involved with the effort described loading up SUVs, cars, and even carts pulled by donkeys to get the documents to the nearby Niger River, 10 miles away, to then be transported by boat to Bamako and other cities in southern Mali. Residents stressed repeatedly that this was a local effort undertaken overwhelmingly by private citizens—not by international organizations or even the Malian government.
"Residents understand the importance of these documents, and have never fully trusted the government with preserving them," says Mr. Hamou. "This is evidenced by the fact that even after the Ahmed Baba Institute opened, the vast majority of manuscripts in the city were still housed in private collections."
Without the careful removal effort, it is likely that countless more pieces of history would have been destroyed. The militants made the Ahmed Baba Institute their main base, living in the very rooms designed to host visiting calligraphers and manuscript experts.
Al-Hosseini, a young man who worked as a guide at the facility during its operation, walks slowly through the abandoned building now covered in dust, pointing to various piles of clothes, boxes, and graffiti scrawled on walls. "This was their home. Actually, despite what they said about piety, they lived nicer than the rest of the population, with air-conditioning and nice rooms." Safes containing money and small valuables were wrenched open, and doors were smashed in.
Some of the manuscripts' survival came down to mere luck, with militants never discovering a basement room at the center containing the most precious documents, which had not been moved. "They are still there," Al-Hosseini says, breaking into a smile.
Outside, at the entrance to the center, the charred remains of what Al-Hosseini estimates was about 300 manuscripts lie blowing in the wind, with their library catalog boxes scattered nearby. "As they heard about the French coming, they became vengeful toward us, and wanted to hurt us," Al-Hosseini says.
The overwhelming majority of the manuscripts of Timbuktu are safe, for now. Of the approximately 30,000 documents in the Ahmed Baba Institute libraries, more than 28,000 were shipped out to other locations. And Timbuktu residents say that because the rest of the documents were not stored in one place but scattered among different local families, many manuscripts were kept safe.
But resentment toward the government's perceived abandonment of the city and its priceless historical heritage simmers beneath the surface in Timbuktu, with many residents wondering why the government effectively abandoned them to be ruled by hostile insurgents intent on destroying the city. "We had to do most things ourselves," says Hama Khalil, director of the Timbuktu Museum. "I personally oversaw the removal of more than 600 pieces of priceless Timbuktu history, from Tuareg spears to ancient pottery to old French rifles and clothing, to secret locations throughout the city. We had to hide most of it in private homes, even in my house. There was no help."
Mr. Hamou highlighted the problems that still lie ahead. He fears that the documents are still at risk of neglect. "People after this probably will not be interested in ever sharing them, even with local researchers like myself."
Beyond that, the return of fighting to Timbuktu has the city on edge. On March 31, one day before the anniversary of the original takeover, the city was attacked in a well-coordinated offensive by the same militants who had occupied it for much of the previous year. The attack strained the Malian Army's capabilities and ultimately required French military support to come to an end.
Citizens, chasing the attackers around the city in large mobs with sticks and stones, played an integral role in the city's defense, even providing insurgent locations to the Malian Army soldiers.
Residents have mixed expectations about how it will end. "I'm very, very happy the French are here, and have helped us start to protect ourselves," says Salmana Traure, an adviser for the Timbuktu department of education in the city, expressing confidence in the training the Malian Army is receiving from the French.
That training mission was originally intended to be finished by the end of 2013, though recent statements by François Hollande, France's president, have indicated that an auxiliary force of up to 1,000 soldiers may remain in the country well beyond the end of the year.
Others were more hardened in their views. Mr. Khalil, the museum director, says, "Well, there were about 3,000 fighters here, and the French and Malians claim to have killed about 1,000 of them. Until those 2,000 others are dead, this won't end."
Regardless of how the next few months unfold, it is likely that the manuscripts will remain cloaked in darkness, wrapped in cloth, hidden with the citizens of Timbuktu.
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