![]() ![]() Other manuscripts were lost due to climatic effects, such as drought, which led to many people burying them and fleeing. As a result, many families there still refuse to grant access to researchers, fearing a repeat of the French treatment. Today, the institute has just about 30,000 manuscripts, which are constantly being studied, cataloged, and preserved, however, at the time of the French colonial administration of Timbuktu (1894-1959), many of the manuscripts were seized and set alight by the invading colonialists. A veritable example is the Ahmed Baba Institute, which was established in 1979, and named after the famous 16th/17th-century scholar, considered the greatest in Africa. More than 60 libraries in Timbuktu are still owned and managed by local families and institutions, some of which are collections that survived the turbulence through the region, as well as the ravages from nature. National Geographic even estimates that 700,000 manuscripts have survived in the city of Timbuktu alone. These styles were developed in Timbuktu and the surrounding regions of Mali and. Upon the real and present dangers posed by fires, insects, and plundering, some one million manuscripts have since survived from the northern edges of Guinea and Ghana to the shores of the Mediterranean. The manuscripts are written in various styles of the Arabic script and date back to as early as the 13th century. The other is just the kind of vandalism that goes with uneducated barbarians that I have seen these people to be.A piece of the Mali and Timbuktu Manuscripts You know, we're getting out of here, let's do maximum damage to whatever we can in the city. So there must have been destruction of the building out of spite. They talk of legal issues, social history of the region you have basic mathematics texts and some fairly advanced scientific text."Īsked about the motivation for destroying the library, Jeppie said: "The most beautifully illustrated and illuminated are the old Qurans," he told Morning Edition, adding that there were also "prayers and grammar, and text that would've been used in the educational system in the informal classes held at the feet of teachers and so on. Shamil Jeppie, who teaches at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, was familiar with the library's contents. Kuwait and South Africa are among the countries that have contributed funds to the building, and a new structure was completed just four years ago. Many are from the 14th to the 16th centuries and were written in Arabic. The institute, which was established in 1973, held some 20,000 manuscripts. They imposed their rigid interpretation of Islam on the city's residents and had destroyed many cultural and historic sites, include the mausoleums of saints.Īnd in a final act of destruction, they set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute, a library and research center that housed ancient texts, including Qurans and other Islamic works, dating back to the 13th century. The Islamist fighters took control of Timbuktu and much of northern Mali last spring. The mayor was in Mali's capital, Bamako, but was preparing to return to his home city after the Islamist radicals fled Timbuktu in the face of advancing French troops who are assisting Mali's government. They are close to my heart, and they belong to the whole world," the mayor said. They are documents about Islam, history, geography, botany, poetry. "These priceless manuscripts are my identity, they're my history. The mayor of Timbuktu, Halle Ousmane Cisse, summed up his feelings in an interview with NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton on Morning Edition: Islamist insurgents retreating from Timbuktu set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts, according to the Saharan towns mayor, in an. These photos from Timbuktu, Mali, on Tuesday confirmed what many had feared: Ancient books and texts at a famed library were torched by Islamic radicals before they fled. 31: New reports from Timbuktu indicate that " most manuscripts were saved." ![]()
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