Author and journalist Joshua Hammer found a story for his latest book for which the title, which uses a word not often seen in The Blade, is factual.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts is a true tale of saving scripture and secular books.
It is an adventure story of scholars and their family members, led by a Timbuktu archivist and historian named Abdel Kader Haidara, who had become internationally known for his library collecting and preservation work.
Mr. Haidara’s massive operation beat a jihadi threat to destroy articles of history and culture by the terrorist organization al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
In 2012, Mr. Haidara and his colleagues smuggled more than 370,000 rare and ancient works to safety, most of them handwritten manuscripts and including illuminated Qur’ans, works from the Hadith that are said to be pronouncements by Muhammad, and books of Islamic jurisprudence.
The librarians were saving literary religious relics from power-hungry rebels’ idea of religion, just at a time when Timbuktu was again becoming known for its literary holdings.
Mr. Hammer wrote that travelers in the 14th and 16th centuries “described a vibrant culture of manuscript writing and book collecting centered in Timbuktu. European historians and philosophers had contended that black Africans were illiterates with no history, but Timbuktu’s manuscripts proved the opposite — that a sophisticated, freethinking society had thrived south of the Sahara at at time when much of Europe was still mired in the Middle Ages.”
But there had been other times of cultural suppression and manuscripts being dispersed.
Mr. Haidara’s favorite manuscript acquisitions from his more than 16,500 volumes — his own family library was started in the 1500s — showed tolerance in Islam, defying post-9/11 stereotypes.
Mr. Hammer quoted Mr. Haidara as saying, “We need to show the West the truth.”
And, suddenly, he needed to keep that truth from religious fanatics.
The imam of a mosque that was built from 1400 to 1440 said of al-
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, “We don’t want your kind of Islam here. … How dare you say you’re going to ‘teach us Islam’? We were born with Islam. We have had Islam in this city for one thousand years.”
Another man told Mr. Hammer that “these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way.”
Mr. Haidara “knew that many of the works epitomized the reasoned discourse and intellectual inquiry that the militants, with their rigid views of Islam, their intolerance, and their hatred of modernity and rationality, wanted to destroy. It was inevitable, he was coming to believe, that the manuscripts would become a target,” Mr. Hammer wrote.
When the threat was imminent, Mr. Haidara and his colleagues first took the texts, “ranging from four-hundred-page, leather-encased volumes to single folios, including some of the greatest works of medieval literature in the world,” out of 45 libraries in homes and institutions and got the manuscripts into more than 30 safe houses in Timbuktu.
Then, when the threat of destruction was greater, they moved the works 606 miles away to 26 locations in Bamako, the capital of Mali, which remained under government control. Most, in 2,500 footlockers, were taken in trucks, but later about 100,000 manuscripts went part of the way by boat on the Niger River.
“Haidara told nobody outside his fellow librarians what he was doing — not even his immediate family,” Mr. Hammer wrote.
The budget was $700,000, and donations came from organizations in Dubai, the Netherlands, a Kickstarter campaign, and the Dutch National Lottery. Key Bank, based in Cleveland, helped to get the money into the hands of merchants who would get the funds to Mr. Haidara.
They didn’t lose a single manuscript in the smuggling operation. The only works that were burned were in a government library that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was using as a headquarters.
“Timbuktu had been the incubator for the richness of Islam, and Islam in its perverted form had attempted to destroy it,” Hammer wrote.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu shows dedication and determination in defying misguided zealots, holding on until culture once again can focus on a better world.
Contact TK Barger @ tkbarger@theblade.com, 419-724-6278 or on Twitter @TK_Barger.
First Published April 23, 2016, 4:00 a.m.