Jan 28 (Reuters) – The burning of a library housing
thousands of ancient manuscripts in Mali’s desert city of
Timbuktu is just the latest act of destruction by Islamist
fighters who have spent months smashing graves and holy shrines
in the World Heritage site.
The United Nations cultural body UNESCO said it was trying
to find out the precise damage done to the Ahmed Baba Institute,
a modern building that contains priceless documents dating back
to the 13th century.
The manuscripts are “uniquely valuable and testify to a long
tradition of learning and cultural exchange,” said UNESCO
spokesman Roni Amelan. “So we are horrified.”
But if they are horrified, historians and religious scholars
are unlikely to have been surprised by this gesture of defiance
by Islamist rebels fleeing the ancient trading post on the
threshold of the Sahara as French and Malian troops moved in.
“It was one of the greatest libraries of Islamic manuscripts
in the world,” said Marie Rodet, an African history lecturer at
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
“It’s pure retaliation. They knew they were losing the
battle and they hit where it really hurts,” she told Reuters.
Turban-swathed Tuareg rebels first swept into Timbuktu back
in April 2012 to plant the flag of their newly declared northern
Mali homeland.
Before the occupation, Timbuktu and its ancient mosques and
burial grounds had become an obligatory stop for budget
backpackers seeking the desert experience and scholars looking
for historical wisdom from rare Islamic texts.
Written in ornate calligraphy, these manuscripts form a
compendium of learning on everything from law, sciences,
astrology and medicine to history and politics, which academics
say prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the
European Renaissance.
For years, people came to experience what locals called “the
mystery of Timbuktu”. They also came for camel rides at the
gates of the desert, boat rides on the Niger river to spot
hippos, and to visit the city’s famous mud-built mosques with
their distinctive turrets and protruding timber beams.
But soon after the Tuareg invasion, the city of the 333
Saints fell under the sway of Islamist radicals. Bars and hotels
closed and the tourists, already spooked by earlier incidents of
abduction and murder by al Qaeda linked militants, stayed away.
CAMPAIGN OF DESTRUCTION
It was not long before the Islamists imposed severe Sharia
law and set about a campaign of destruction of centuries-old
Sufi sites that prompted international outrage.
Shrines, graves and mausoleums were attacked with pick-axes,
shovels and even bulldozers. The bones of Sufi saints were dug
up, and the hard-liners tore down a mosque door that locals
believed had to stay shut until the end of the world.
The militants from the Malian Ansar Dine militant group that
occupied Timbuktu (the name means Defenders of the Faith in
Arabic) espouse an uncompromising version of Islam that rejects
what it sees as idolatry and aims to destroy all traces of it.
In Timbuktu, their targets have been sites revered by Sufis,
a mystical school of popular Islam which honours its saints with
ornate shrines. At least half of 16 listed mausoleums in the
city have been destroyed, along with a substantial part of the
history of Islam in Africa.
A spokesman for Ansar Dine, asked to comment last year on
the smashing of Sufi mausoleums in Timbuktu, said their actions
were ordained by faith. “We are subject to religion and not to
international opinion,” the spokesman said.
Similar episodes have been recorded in Libya following the
fall of Muammar Gaddafi, when Islamists used a bulldozer to dig
up Sufi graves in a cemetery in the city of Benghazi.
Most notoriously, Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban blew up two
giant 6th century statues of Buddha at Bamiyan in 2001, despite
outcry from around the world.
UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova has made appeals for
the warring parties to spare “Timbuktu’s outstanding earthen
architectural wonders”. These include the Sankore, Sidi Yahia
and Djingarei-ber mosques, the last Timbuktu’s oldest, built
from mud bricks and wood in 1325.
The origins of Timbuktu – the name is believed to derive
from the words Tin-Boctou (meaning the place or well of Boctou,
a local woman) – date back to the 5th century.
The site on an old Saharan trading route that saw salt from
the Arab north exchanged for gold and slaves from black Africa
to the south, blossomed in a 16th century Golden Age as an
Islamic seat of learning, home to priests, scribes and jurists.
A 15th century Malian proverb proclaims: “Salt comes from
the north, gold from the south, but the word of God and the
treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo.”
RUMOURS OF GOLD
It was rumours of gold that drove European explorers to
cross the trackless sands of the Sahara to search for the
legendary city, already known for centuries to local inhabitants
who traversed the deserts on camelback and navigated the muddy
brown waters of the Niger by canoes.
Some of these foreign explorers died of thirst in the desert
or were robbed and slain by fierce Tuareg warriors, while
Timbuktu’s mirage-like renown – no doubt enhanced by
thirst-crazed, feverish imaginations – reached glittering
proportions in the consciousness of 19th century Europe.
Scottish explorer Gordon Laing was the first European to
arrive in Timbuktu in 1826, but he did not live to tell the
tale, perishing at the hands of desert robbers.
It was not until two years later that Frenchman Rene-Auguste
Caillie became the first European to see Timbuktu and survive to
recount what he saw. “I have been to Timbuktu!” he is said to
have breathlessly told the French consul in Tangier after he
staggered back from his epic Saharan journey.
But after all his dreams of glittering minarets and palaces
filled with gold, Caillie was disappointed to find in Timbuktu
what it has largely remained for centuries: a dun-coloured town
in a dun-coloured desert.
“I had a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth
of Timbuctoo,” he wrote. “The city presented, at first view,
nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth.
Nothing was to be seen in all directions, but immense quicksands
of yellowish white colour,” he added.
This initial sense of disappointment for outsiders, the myth
not matching reality, seems to have traversed the centuries.
Normally loquacious Irish rocker and anti-famine campaigner
Bob Geldof is reported to have been somewhat underwhelmed when
he arrived in Timbuktu during the 1980s. “Is that it?” he said.
(Reporting by Bate Felix and Maria Golovnina, writing by Giles
Elgood, editing by Peter Millership)