Book Series: The Bad-Ass Librarians Of Timbuktu
- 'RecaliBRAINtion'©
- Aug 17
- 3 min read
The Bad-Ass Librarians Of Timbuktu By Joshua Hammer
2016
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
IN THE 1980s, a young archivist, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of pastoralists and farmers. His goal: to preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the remarkable true tale of how mild-mannered Haidara became one of the world's most prolific smugglers, organizing a heroic heist to sneak all 350,000 manuscripts to the safety of southern Mali, "At once a history, caper and thriller" (The Economist), it is the extraordinary story of a man who, through extreme circum-stances, discovered his higher calling-and a reminder that ordinary citizens often do the most to protect the beauty of their culture from the threats of the modern world.
Prologue:
He shifted nervously in the front passenger seat of the four wheel-drive vehicle as it approached the southern exit of the city. Down the tarmac road, in the pink light of the desert morning, two gunmen stood beside a checkpoint made from a rope strung across a pair of oil barrels. They were lean men with beards and turbans, Kalashnikov semiautomatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Take a deep breath, he told himself. Smile. Be respectful. He had already been arrested once by the Islamic Police, hauled before a makeshift tribunal, inter-rogated, and threatened with Shariah punishment. That time he had managed-just barely—to persuade them to set him free. He couldn't count on being lucky a second time.
He cast a glance at the rear compartment. There, covered with blankets, lay five padlocked steamer trunks, each one filled with trea-sure: hundreds of illuminated manuscripts, including some from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Golden Age of Timbuktu. Encased in goatskin covers with inlaid semiprecious stones, they were gorgeous works composed by the most skillful scribes of the era, fragile pages covered with dense calligraphy and complex geometrical designs. in a multitude of colors. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terrorist group that had seized the north of the country four months earlier, had several times vowed on television and radio to respect them, but few in the city believed their promises. The extremists had declared jhad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts-treatises about logic, as-trology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love—represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive. And there were thousands of manuscripts just like these hidden in safe houses in Timbuktu. Now he and a small team had set out to save them.
The driver stopped at the roadblock. The two Al Qaeda gunmen peered into the car.
"Salaam Aleikum," he said, with all the equanimity he could muster. Peace be upon you. They were young men, barely out of their teens, but they had dead eyes and the hard, fanatical look of true believers.
"Where are you going?"
"Bamako," he said, the capital in the south.
The men circled the car, and peered into the back.
Wordlessly they waved him onward.
He exhaled. But they still had another six hundred miles to go…
Reviews:
"It has all the elements of a classic adventure.... Riveting skullduggery, revealing history and current affairs combine in a compelling narrative with a rare happy ending."
The Seattle Times
Author: JOSHUA HAMMER was a bureau chief for Newsweek and correspondent-at-large on five continents. He is now a contributing editor to Smithsonian and Outside, and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
BONUS:
Incredibly the manuscripts were found, scanned and preserved now accessible to all. From law and business to astronomy and ethics, bedroom tips to the dangers of smoking! These over 40,000 ancient pages contain more information than ever imagined possible without seeing.
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