International interest in establishing a manuscript conservation center in Timbuktu has simmered since the late 1960s, but the project took on new vigor in the late 1990s, after Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard's African and African American studies department, visited during the filming of a PBS documentary and met Abdel Haidara. After two days of being cajoled, Haidara agreed to show Gates his family's manuscripts. Gates later tells me over the phone that seeing the books was a revelation. "It was one of the greatest moments of my life," he says. "I was overwhelmed."
"I knew that the mind of the black world was locked in those trunks," he says. "And when I held those books in my hands, tears rolled down my face." Gates previously had believed the claims of Western scholars, historians and philosophers that Africa had no intellectual tradition, no written record. "This put the lie to that," he says.
This Arabic manuscript dates to the 14th century.
(Xavier Ross - Gamma)
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Gates helped Abdel Haidara get an Andrew Mellon Foundation grant to establish the Mamma Haidara Library, of which Haidara is now director.
Haidara, who continues to buy manuscripts for his library when they become available -- in one case, for two cows -- is collaborating with the International Museum of Muslim Cultures, in the unlikely location of Jackson, Miss. (chosen, it turns out, because Mississippi is the American state with the largest percentage of African Americans, many of them descendants of slaves who were Muslim). The Mississippi museum is planning an exhibit of 25 manuscripts this summer called "The Legacy of Timbuktu: Wonders of the Written Word."
The manuscripts on loan to the museum include writings on the Koran, animal rights, women's rights, food preparation, travel, the making and playing of musical instruments, art and conflict resolution. Among those who wrote about conflict resolution is Oumar Tall, a 19th-century scholar from Timbuktu. "Tragedy is due to divergence and because of a lack of tolerance. In the tradition of the Prophet, it is written that those who keep rancor in their hearts will not benefit from divine mercy . . .," he wrote. "It is written by the Guide of mankind that he who associates himself with God and kills voluntarily will not be pardoned.
"Glory be to he who creates greatness from difference and makes peace and reconciliation."
By bringing these manuscripts to the United States, Abdel Haidara later tells me by e-mail, he hopes to show that tolerance has a valued place in Islamic tradition.
The museum plans to highlight a little-known connection between its host state and the manuscripts of Timbuktu: the story of Ibrahima Abd ar-Rahman, an 18th-century prince from what is now Guinea who studied at Timbuktu before being sold into slavery in Natchez, Miss. The prince's saga contradicts another widely held Western belief -- that Africans sold in the slave trade were uncivilized. In fact, many were doctors, dentists, lawyers, professors, musicians and members of royal families. And a large number were Muslim.
BACK IN TIMBUKTU, we stroll to the Sankore Mosque, a mud pyramid whose exterior walls are studded with projecting beams used as scaffolding for making repairs after the brief rainy season. Mud, after all, dissolves in the rain, which makes it all the more remarkable that the building has stood since the 15th century. Again, the tenacity and pride of devoted Malians is the reason it survives: On mosque-patching day, everyone turns out to mix mud, and bolster and smooth the walls. The routine takes place all over Mali, and it is the one day each year that all mosques open their doors to non-believers -- even the Great Mosque in Djenne, which shut out tourists after a Western woman, whose exact provenance no one, thankfully, seems to remember, was caught inside baring her breasts for a friend's video camera.
The Sankore Mosque is revered especially because it was the center of the university where Ahmed Baba, a 16th-century scholar, taught. As we stand before the building, soaking it all in, we hear a Snoop Dogg sample of the Doors' song "Riders on the Storm" wafting from a nearby cafe. Around the corner, a teenage boy named Ali, whom we have hired as a guide, points to a camouflaged truck and says it was left behind by Green Berets who were here recently, training local militias in counterterrorism. Some say the exercises have served only to politically empower rebels and bandits, who are fast turning the vast expanse of the Sahara north of Timbuktu into a no-man's land. On the day we depart, two tourists from Qatar will be kidnapped not far from Timbuktu, though later they will be released.
On the northern edge of Timbuktu, the streets slowly play out into the dunes, and mud and concrete buildings give way to the circular straw tents of nomads. Some of the nomads still travel in caravans of donkeys, or, occasionally, of hundreds of camels, to the salt mines in the deeper desert, traveling at night, when it is cool, navigating by the stars. It is a ritual that has been going on for a thousand years. Some of those camels tethered in the dunes are strictly for the tourists, though, and it is possible to charter a flight to an airfield south of the city, which means that the one seemingly incontrovertible fact about Timbuktu -- that it is hard to get to -- need no longer apply. It seems a safe bet that meaningful cultural change will not be far behind. Again.
People such as Hasseye and Abdel Haidara hope the study of the manuscripts will exert a positive influence in the coming years, though today their story is mostly one for esoteric scholars. Even Ahdoudoye, the T-shirt salesman on the hotel steps, concedes that increased appreciation of the texts comes at a time when, in his view, "the youth don't care so much about education. Now, they want hip-hop."
But Ahdoudoye's explanation for why his family held on to their manuscripts, and why he cares about them today, is powerfully simple: "It is our history," he says. "It is knowledge."
Alan Huffman is the author of Mississippi in Africa, which was recently published in paperback.
