The center, painted in tan and pink hues, was built in 2009 to replace an older library with the same name in another part of the city. The jihadists who took control of Timbuktu in April 2012 quickly chose as their headquarters the Ahmed Baba Institute, a state-run library and research center named after a 17th-century Timbuktu scholar.
“This is not only the city’s heritage, it is the heritage of all humanity.” “We took a big risk to save our heritage,” said Abdel Kader Haidara, a prominent preservationist who once loaned 16th- and 18th-century manuscripts from his family’s private collection to the Library of Congress. The New York-based Ford Foundation, the German and Dutch governments, and an Islamic center in Dubai provided most of the funds for the operation, which cost about $1 million. “We knew that if we attracted any attention, the Islamists would arrest us,” Traore recalled. They included Traore, a 30-year-old part-time janitor, and his grandfather, a guard. This is the story of how nearly all the documents were saved, based on interviews with an unlikely cast of characters who detailed their roles for the first time. View Graphic Rescuing ancient documents in Mali It included donkeys, safe houses and smugglers, all deployed to protect the manuscripts by sneaking them out of town.
The scholarly documents depicted Islam as a historically moderate and intellectual religion and were considered cultural treasures by Western institutions - reasons enough for the ultraconservative jihadists to destroy them.īut a secret operation had been set in motion within weeks of the jihadist takeover. They most certainly would have burned the manuscripts - nearly 300,000 pages on a variety of subjects, including the teachings of Islam, law, medicine, mathematics and astronomy - housed in public and private libraries across the city. They had beaten up women for not covering their faces and flogged men for smoking or drinking. They had demolished the tombs of Sufi saints. Radical Islamists had entered Timbuktu four months earlier, and they had set about destroying everything they deemed a sin. The bags were covered in plastic to shield them from a light rain. Behind him were 10 donkeys, each strapped with two large rice bags filled with ancient manuscripts. It was 7 o’clock on a hot night in August, and Hassine Traore was nervous.
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