The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Read online

  Al Zayati was astonished by the scholarship that he encountered in Timbuktu. About one quarter of the city’s population of 100,000 were students who came from as far away as the Arabian Peninsula to learn at the feet of the Songhai Empire’s masters of law, literature, and science. The king, Al Hajj Askia Mohammed Touré, gave lands and financial support to scholars and invited architects to Timbuktu to build mosques and palaces. The University of Sankoré, a loose affiliation of mosques and private homes, developed into the most prestigious of 180 scholastic institutions in the city. A Sudanese proverb from the time declared that “Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo.” According to the Tariq al Fattash, a history of Timbuktu written in the seventeenth century, the city’s reputation for scholarship was so great that, when a famed Tunisian professor arrived in town to become a lecturer at the University of Sankoré, he quickly realized he didn’t qualify, and retreated to Fez to bone up for fourteen years.

  Al Zayati was most impressed by the flourishing trade in manuscripts that he observed in Timbuktu’s markets. The books were made of rag-based paper sold by traders who crossed the desert from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria, where the process had taken root after making its way from China and Central Asia. By the end of the twelfth century, the city of Fez had 472 paper mills and was exporting south to the Sahel and north as well to Majorca and Andalusia. Superior Italian paper soon penetrated the Maghreb, the region of northern Africa that lies west of Egypt, derived from the Arabic word for “sunset,” transshipped via Mediterranean ports such as Cairo and Tripoli. (Some Italian brands bore Christian cross watermarks, making them a difficult sell in Islamic markets.) By the time that Al Zayati arrived in Timbuktu, most paper was being imported from Venice—typically watermarked with the tre lune or three crescents—via the land that is now Libya. Craftsmen extracted ink and dyes from desert plants and minerals, and made covers from the skins of goats and sheep. Binding, however, was unknown in northern Africa at that time; loose, unnumbered folios were enclosed inside leather binders, tied shut with ribbons or strings. Al Zayati noted that the sale of manuscripts was far more profitable than that of other goods.

  Four hundred years before Al Zayati’s visit, a clan from the Tuareg tribe, the veiled, free-ranging pastoralists of the Sahara, made its annual summer migration from a bleak region of salt mines and dunes to a grassy plain beside the Niger River, 150 miles to the south. A plague of mosquitoes and sand flies, an infestation of toads, and the stench of decaying marsh grass made their usual encampment intolerable, so they picked up stakes and moved with their camels, cattle, and goats to a more congenial spot they discovered, a few miles north, on a tributary of the Niger formed by seasonal flooding. A shallow well provided clean, sweet water. When they migrated north in September, they left their heavy baggage in the care of a local Tuareg woman they called Bouctou—“the one with the big belly button.” Word spread about this hospitable meeting place of camel and canoe. The next year, other nomads asked them where they were heading. “We are going to Tin-bouctou,” they replied, the well of Bouctou.

  During the next hundred years Timbuktu grew from a collection of tents and mud-and-wattle houses along the riverbank into a crossroads of the world and a collision point of two cultures—bringing together desert and river traffic in continuous and mutually enriching exchanges. Farmers, fishermen, black Tuareg slaves known as bellas, their aristocratic Tuareg masters, and Arab and Berber traders fleeing an animist despot of the then declining Ghanaian Empire—located in what is today southern Mauritania and western Mali—settled in the town. Camel caravans laden with salt, dates, jewelry, Maghrebi spices, incense, European fabrics, and other goods from as far away as England arrived in Timbuktu after weeks crossing the Sahara. Boats sailed north on the Niger, bringing to Timbuktu, at the river’s highest bend, the products of jungle and savannah—slaves, gold, ivory, cotton, cola nuts, baobab flour, honey, Guinean spices, cotton, and shea butter, an ivory-colored fat extracted from the nut of the African shea tree. Traders, middlemen, and monarchs made fortunes in the main currency—gold. When Mansa Musa, otherwise known as Musa I, the ruler of the Malian Empire—a vast territory that subsumed parts of the collapsed Ghanaian Empire and also comprised modern-day Guinea and northern Mali—traveled in 1324 on the hajj to Mecca from Timbuktu, he brought several thousand silk-clad slaves and eighty camels carrying three hundred pounds of gold dust each. “The emperor flooded Cairo with his benefactions,” wrote an Arab historian of the time. “He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold.” The emperor dispensed so much gold during his stopover in Cairo, wrote the historian, that he suppressed its value in the city’s markets for a dozen years.

  In the late fourteenth century, Timbuktu began to emerge as a regional center of scholasticism and culture. Mansa Musa brought back from the hajj a famed poet from the Andalusia region of Spain, and invited one of Cairo’s preeminent architects to design Timbuktu’s most imposing mosque, Djingareyber. In 1375, the city appeared on a European map drawn by the Jewish cartographer of Majorca, Abraham Cresques, in an atlas made for Charles V of France, a sign of Timbuktu’s prominence. But this age of intellectual ferment was not to last. In 1468, the warlord Sunni Ali and his army marched and rode toward Timbuktu. Born in Gao, a Niger River port two hundred miles to the east, Sunni Ali came from a line of local chieftains who had controlled the Gao region since the 1330s, but he had his eyes on a bigger prize. Islamic chronicles portray him as a brilliant military tactician; a skillful horseman who led his own cavalry into battle; a practitioner of an animist faith who opposed Islam and partook in the casting of spells and the use of talismans and animal parts for good luck and fortune-telling; an avid slaver; and an insecure ruler who, after capturing the city, initially welcomed the savants to Timbuktu, then turned against them, convinced they were plotting his overthrow. “The great oppressor and evildoer Sunni Ali . . . killed so many human beings that only God most high could count them,” one Timbuktu historian declared. “He tyrannized scholars and holy men, killing them, insulting them, and humiliating them. He perpetrated terrible wickedness in the city, putting it to flame, sacking and killing large numbers of people.” Eventually he built up a kingdom—the Songhai Empire—that stretched for two thousand miles along the Niger River.

  Sunni Ali reigned without serious rivals, but a bloody succession battle followed his death in 1492. A forty-nine-year-old general and devout Muslim—and a nephew of Sunni Ali, according to some historical texts—named Mohammed Touré put together an army and defeated the forces of Sunni Ali’s son near Gao in April 1493. As would happen often in Timbuktu’s history, the nightmare of violent repression would give way to a golden age of openness and tolerance. Declaring himself the new ruler of the Songhai Empire, and renaming himself after his pilgrimage to Mecca for the hajj, King Al Hajj Askia Mohammed Touré ushered in an era of peace and prosperity that would endure for one hundred years.

  By the time that Askia Mohammed consolidated his power over Timbuktu, the literary tradition was well entrenched in the city, despite Sunni Ali’s antischolastic purges. Visiting academics had brought from Cairo, Córdoba, and beyond the classic tools of Islamic scholarship: Korans, the Hadith (the pronouncements of the Prophet Mohammed as compiled by his companions); inquiries into Sufism, the moderate and mystical form of Islam that had spread from Morocco across most of North Africa; and works of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, the dominant legal system in the Sahel, centered at the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia. The thirst for such works had inspired a thriving cottage industry. Scribes made elaborate facsimiles of the imported volumes for the libraries of professors and wealthy patrons. Working side by side in ateliers in the alleys of Timbuktu, the most prolific copied works at the rate of one every two months—writing an average of 150 lines of calligraphy per day—receiving their comp
ensation in gold nuggets or gold dust. These scribes employed proofreaders who pored over every Arabic character, receiving a percentage of the payment. A colophon—Greek for “finishing touch”—at the end of each work recorded the manuscript’s start and completion date, the place where the manuscript was written, and the names of the scribe, proofreader, and vocalizer, a third craftstman who inked the “short vowel” sounds that are not usually represented in Arabic script. The patron who commissioned the work frequently received a mention as well. The scribes also produced so-called ajami manuscripts, transliterating into classical Arabic script a multitude of local languages—Tamasheq, the language of the Tuaregs; Fulani; Hausa; Bambara; and Soninké.

  Despite the dedication to religious scholarship, the Islam that took root in Timbuktu was never very strict. Leo Africanus (Al Zayati) wrote that many residents “spend a great part of the night singing and dancing through all the streets of the city.” Most of Timbuktu’s residents, one traveler noted, didn’t observe the Ramadan fast, consumed alcohol, and restricted their observance of Islam to the practice of circumcision and going to mosque for Friday prayers. The imams of Timbuktu and the general population were receptive to secular ideas, many of which had been exported to the Saharan entrepôt by moderate scholars of Cairo, a more cosmopolitan city. Over time, the scribes widened their scope. They copied surveys of algebra, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, and astronomy. They translated into Arabic the works of the greatest Greek philosophers, Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Plato; the “father of medicine,” Hippocrates; and the eleventh-century Persian philosopher and scholar Avicenna, who wrote dozens of manuscripts about ethics, logic, medicine, and pharmacology. Scribes reproduced a twenty-eight-volume Arabic language dictionary called The Mukham, written by an Andalusian scholar in the mid-eleventh century. An analysis of poetry by Al Khalil Ibn Ahmad, a ninth-century linguist and literary historian from Iraq, used complex circular diagrams to depict the metric patterns of Arabic verse.

  Great original books as well came out of Timbuktu, by a swelling number of local scientists, historians, philosophers, and versemakers. Anthologies of poems celebrated everything from the Prophet to romantic love to more mundane subjects such as green tea. The Tariq Al Sudan presented, in thirty-eight chapters, an unparalleled history of life on the Middle Niger under the Songhai emperors, describing in great detail trade routes, battles, invasions, and daily life in cities such as Djenné, famed for its thirteenth-century Great Mud Mosque. “The land of Djenné is prosperous and densely inhabited, with major markets every day of the week. It is said there are 7,077 villages in that land, all close to one another,” the author observed. “If the sultan wants to summon to Djenné someone living near Lake Debo [a seasonal lake north of Djenné, formed by the flooding of the Niger River basin], his messenger goes to a gate in the wall and calls the name of the person in question. People pass on the message from village to village, and it reaches the person immediately, and he comes and presents himself.”

  The city’s legal experts compiled vast scholarship about Islamic jurisprudence, or fikh, some of which provided insights into the progressive nature of Timbuktu’s society. “I have read your question and carefully considered it,” many of these volumes begin, before the author provides a fatwa, or Islamic legal ruling, on issues ranging from the distribution of inheritances to the withdrawal of sexual privilege from the marital bed. One fatwa supported a woman’s decision not to sleep with her husband by arguing that men had often exercised the same right. Another consists of a lengthy disquisition on obligatory alms, or zakat, declaring that acceptance of charity from thieves and oppressors is the equivalent of abetting their crimes, and that the duty of alms giving belongs to everyone who possesses a minimum degree of wealth, not just aristocrats.

  Timbuktu’s astronomers studied the movement of the stars and their relationship to the seasons, accompanying their writings with elaborate charts of the heavens. Manuscripts contained precise diagrams of the orbits of the planets, based on complex mathematical calculations. The astronomers instructed readers on the use of a gnomon, or the shadow-casting edge of a sundial, to time the five daily Islamic prayers; used spherical trigonometry to calculate the exact direction of the Qibla, the direction to be faced during prayer; advanced arguments for the adoption of the earth-centered model of the solar system; tested a formula to calculate leap years; and diagrammed the “mansions,” or stations of the moon in its orbit around the earth, a means of tracking the time at night, the lunar calendar, and the passage of the seasons. They documented a range of celestial phenomena, including a 1593 meteor shower: “In the year 991 in God’s month of Rajab the Godly, after half the night had passed stars flew around as if fire had been kindled in the whole sky—east, west, north and south,” wrote one astronomical observer. “It became a nightly flame lighting up the earth, and people were extremely disturbed. It continued until after dawn.”

  Physicians issued instructions on nutrition and described the therapeutic properties of desert plants. They prescribed herbal remedies to help ease women through labor, toad meat to treat snakebites, and droppings from panthers mixed with butter to ease the pain of boils. Ethicists debated such issues as polygamy, moneylending, and slavery. There were catalogues of spells and incantations; astrology; fortune-telling; black magic; necromancy, or communication with the dead by summoning their spirits to discover hidden knowledge; geomancy, or divining markings on the ground made from tossed rocks, dirt, or sand; hydromancy, reading the future from the ripples made from a stone cast into a pool of water; and other occult subjects that would prove to be especially odious to Timbuktu’s future jihadi occupiers.

  One of the most eye-opening volumes, Advising Men on Sexual Engagement with Their Women, served as a guide to aphrodisiacs and infertility remedies and provided counsel on winning back wives who had strayed from the marital bed. At a time when women’s sexuality was barely acknowledged in the West, the manuscript, a kind of Baedeker to orgasm, offered tips for maximizing sexual pleasure on both sides. “Drinking cow-milk and mixing the powder from a burned cow horn with food or drink increases sexual potency,” the manuscript advises. “For abundant sexual activity and sexual climax a man must drink the dried, pulverised testicles of a bull. If a man suffers from impotence he must take the nail of a cock’s right leg, burn it and fumigate himself with the smoke and he will be cured.” The manuscript continued with an ever more exotic list of potions and remedies, some based on animist practices that had existed in the region for millennia. “The dried, pulverised penis of a lizard placed tenderly into honey then licked will let a man experience full sexual desire and satisfaction and will increase his sperm count,” it declared. The manuscript asserted that sexual pleasure was sanctioned by Islam, and even recommended prayer as a means of prolonging erections and intensifying orgasms. “In order to strengthen his penis and enjoy sexual intercourse,” it declares, “the husband must recite the following Qur’anic verses: ‘Allah is the One Who created you from [your state of] weakness and made out of the weakness strength’; Say ‘[O Muhammed] O you disbelievers’; and ‘Li Ila fi Quraysh’ until its end.” The author recommended reciting these verses three times a day for a week while standing over seven water-soaked leaves from an acacia tree, then drinking the water before sex. The application of Koranic verses as sexual stimulants suggested both the deep-rootedness of religion in Timbuktu’s quotidian life, and the daring nature of the Islam that was practiced here. The zealots who would occupy Timbuktu repeatedly over the centuries would regard such use of the Koran as disrespectful, even blasphemous.

  Timbuktu’s manuscripts were as prized for their aesthetic splendor as for their subject matter. The city’s scribes drew upon a variety of complex calligraphic styles: the western African tradition known as Hausa, marked by thick brush strokes; the Kufic form from Persia, with exaggerated horizontals and sharply angled letters that leaned and bent as if prostrating before God; and the most popular style, Maghrebi, characteriz
ed by rounded, bowl-shaped letters and sweeping curves and loops. Unlike Middle Eastern calligraphers, who traditionally used pens sharply cut from the full circumference of a reed, giving their letters a hard edge, Maghrebi scribes sliced the reed into flat slats with blunt, rounded ends, resulting in a distinctly softer and to many eyes a more pleasing outline. Calligraphers also wrote with a pen fashioned from the branch of a local shrub or a bird quill.

  They alternated standard black ink made from charcoal or gum arabic, with a variety of earth colors—yellows derived from an arsenic sulfide known as orpiment, found in hydrothermal veins, fumaroles, and hot springs, and once used in the Roman Empire and ancient China as an arrow-tip poison; crimsons extracted from the powdered mineral cinnabar or, alternatively, from the cochineal, a scale insect that produces carminic acid as a deterrent to predators, which was then mixed with aluminum or calcium salts. The illustrators filtered in other ingredients, such as gelatine, to make the letters glow more brightly, or iron rust, to ensure their indelibility. The finest works contained page after page illuminated by gold leaf, typically twenty-two-karat gold hammered into thin sheets and carefully layered over the paper.

  Discouraged by the Koran from representations of the human form, the manuscript artists filled margins and broke up text blocks with geometric designs in the same earth tones as the calligraphy. Sinuously intertwined and endless repeating arabesques—leaves, vines, palmettes, and flowers—strikingly reminiscent of the mosaics at the Great Mosque of Damascus and the Alhambra Palace in Granada, conveyed the bounty and infiniteness of God’s universe. Kaleidoscopic latticeworks of diamonds, octagons, stars, and other geometric forms communicated balance and symmetry. Some illustrations replicated the patterns of Middle Eastern or Berber carpets—rectangular fields filled with concentric circles of cream, red and green, each aswirl with petals, loops, and abstract calligraphy. The four sides represented the basic elements of existence—fire, water, earth, and air—while the circles were meant to symbolize the physical world. One page from a Koranic manuscript is an exact replica of a Zemmoura flat weave from Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains. Patterns of diagonals and zigzags arranged in rectangular panels resembled the bogolanfini—dyed mud cloths found throughout Mali, typically done by sewing together narrow strips of cotton. Occasionally scribes enlivened their texts with realistic images: delicate pen-and-ink renderings of mosques, medieval stringed instruments, mountain ranges, Saharan oases with shimmering pools and date palm trees. Amber-, turquoise-, and silver-inlaid tooled leather covers were made from the skins of goats, sheep, or camels.