The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu By Joshua Hammer

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

By Joshua Hammer

“Books are ingrained in the soul, words form the sinew and muscle that hold a society upright”
Abdel Kader Haidara page 118

Joshua Hammer was born in New York on June 12, 1957. He was educated at Horace Mann, a private college prep school in the Bronx and went on to Princeton University, and graduated Cum Laude with a BA in English Literature in 1979. He joined the staff of Newsweek in 1988 and in 1992 he became Nairobi Bureau Chief and served as Bureau Chief for South America, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, and Berlin. He lives in Berlin with his partner and youngest son, while his two grown sons from a previous marriage live nearby (Berlin is a good place to be. I’d certainly prefer to be there than the munted shitshow that is the US right now.). He wrote his first book in 1999 and released his latest book this year actually. The subject of this week's review was published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster publishing company. Let's turn to it, shall we?

Timbuktu, which in English has long been used as a metaphor for a faraway mysterious place is often regarded as half mythological. In fact, according to the BBC in 2006, 34% of young Britons thought it didn't exist and more thought it was a completely mythical place (I get it, you hear this ‘disembodied’ name in a language you don’t know and assume it is just an expression. However, that is because we westerners, in general, are pig-ignorant about Africa, and West Africa in particular. People bitch about Black History Month, but even if our society went hard in actually following through on it in a meaningful way, it would scratch the surface because it mostly deals with the forgotten and neglected history of the black people in the US. Africa - which has more than black people in it BTW - is pretty much absent unless you really specialize in university. It’s shameful. I say this because I know next to nothing and know it.). Mr. Hammer does his best to dispel this, laying out the history and importance of Timbuktu in brief in the opening parts of the book. Timbuktu is a real city in the modern nation of Mali, an ancient city that was a center of learning and literature before the first Englishman ever stepped on the North American continent. It was part of the massively wealthy Mali Empire and later part of the even more powerful Songhai Empire afterward, it has been the capital of kingdoms and an isolated colonial outpost. Today it is a UNESCO heritage site and the location of several libraries dedicated to collecting and preserving manuscripts that are some of the oldest and best examples of a native African literary tradition stretching back over 500 years of study, debate, and experimentation. One can find books discussing medicine, algebra, trade, and law from as far back as the 1400s (Mali had trade links and intellectual exchange, as far as I remember, with Europe, the Middle East, and as far away as India and China.). Some are humble works bound in goat-hide, others are shockingly beautiful works written in gold leaf on fine paper and there's at least one example of a Koran written on fish skin carefully bound together into an irregularly shaped prayer book. The libraries of Timbuktu are something of an irony as well, as they stand as a silent rebuke to the long-held European conceit that there is no literature or writing tradition native to Africa (Colonialist trash. In order to justify reducing them to destitution, Colonialists had to reduce the peoples of Africa to a “savage” caricature that had to be “civilized”. Never mind the existence of settled empires that rivaled those of Europe in terms of size and sophistication. Never mind that the unsettled peoples of Africa have and had cultures that are every bit as valid as those present in Europe.). While heavily influenced by Arab traditions, especially in regards to religion through Islam. The fact is that the majority of books are written in African languages by African born scholars. Like other conquerors, French colonial officials looted manuscripts to display in collections and museums in Paris and other European cities. All while bemoaning a lack of African writings (I’ll just be over here, ranting about the colonial looting of native cultures.). This and other waves of looters in pre-colonial times caused a tradition of families hiding their collections. There are over 370,000 known works in the assembled collections and libraries of Timbuktu and as you can imagine these books are under threat. Usually, the threat is a collection of mundane dangers that haunt books across the world: rot, neglect, termites and other pests, and of course the ever-present scourge of time (Depending on what they’re made of, books are incredibly fragile. Plant fibers dry rot, for instance, and crumble at the slightest touch.). Against these, the people of Timbuktu - with some outside funding and support - have marshaled a growing class of scholars and librarians who seek to restore and preserve the works, as well as catalog and digitize the collections. Such work extends the life of the manuscripts by decades if not more and digitization ensures that the information can be preserved against almost all foes simply by replicating it on a vast scale. However, in the opening decade of our century, another threat raised its head.

The terrorist organization of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb started operations in the Sahel region and in time made a play to overthrow the nation of Mali to found an extremist Islamic Caliphate (Seriously, fuck these people.). In 2012 Timbuktu was occupied by Jihadist fighters of Al Qaeda and this placed the city under threat. Not only the various Sufi shrines (Sufi Islam, for those that don’t know, is a branch of Islamic Mysticism. It’s primarily but not exclusively an offshoot of Sunni Islam. I wish I could go into it more. Look into it folks, it’s neat.) that ring the city but the manuscripts themselves were in danger since many of them discussed subjects that the Wahhabist branch of Islam considered heretical or things that Al Qaeda's leaders found dangerous, like poetry or music (What is it with religious fanatics and hating poetry, music, and dance? Why do they have to be so… joyless all the damned time? {I talk more about this later}). Because apparently nothing terrifies a group of armed religious fanatics more than erotic poems about tea or songs praising the beauty of the desert night. Secretly opposing them was an organization made up of archivists, librarians, old families across the city, and normal citizens; leading this effort was Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara. Dr. Haidara's goal was nothing less than to smuggle the massive collection of books out from under the nose of thuggish theocrats and to safety at Mali's capital city of Bomoko and he leaned hard on the Timbuktu tradition of hiding the manuscripts from pushy conquers looking to destroy or loot. He had to either smuggle the books out over badly maintained desert roads that are guarded by Al Qaeda fighter or corrupt Mali soldiers, across the desert itself using pack animals or down the Niger river in small boats. What he couldn’t do himself, he had to recruit others to do, often in the dead of the night in occupied territory. It was a task fraught with risk and half of it came down to scrambling for funds from western or wealthy middle eastern backers but Dr. Haidara threw everything he had into it. (When this happened, I was teaching a biology class at the University of Texas at Arlington. UTA has a large immigrant population from the middle east, but also has… well Texans who are often islamophobic shits. So I actually took the time to go over this effort in my class.) 

Mr. Hammer devotes a good deal of the book to looking at Dr. Haidara's life before Al Qaeda was even a rumor on the wind, starting in the 1980s when Dr. Haidara was selected by his father to be the guardian of his own family's collection of manuscripts. We follow Dr. Haidara through his recruitment by Mahmoud Zouber for the Ahmed Baba Institute, from there his training in how to determine the age and value of a manuscript, often by looking at the original author of the work as well as the design of it. We follow his career across Mali and the region of northwestern Africa as he hunts down manuscripts and begins the long process of persuading the owners to either sell or donate the books to the newly established libraries. We see him become established as an acknowledged authority in his field and start his own library The Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library named after his father and gather there tens of thousands of books. Of course, Dr. Haidara's life isn't all fun and chasing books through deserts, forests, and swamps. He also faces the backbreaking work of getting funding to keep the work going. This often involves chasing after wealthy people from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, grant-hunting from American or European Institutions (A task I do not envy him…), and fending off people who are less interested in supporting his work and more interested in looting his collection. Even if they're willing to pay for the privilege. This includes a memorable clash with agents of Libyan dictator Muammar Al Qaddafi who attempted to buy out his entire collection under the cover of making a donation (I am so glad this bastard is dead.). It's through this that Mr. Hammer shows us how Dr. Haidara earned the skills and connections to protect his heritage from Al Qaeda.

Mr. Hammer also spends some time detailing the leaders and the troops that made up the organization of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the many regional organizations operating under the banner of Al Qaeda. We see how their leaders are men who have been operating as fighters and criminals for decades and this branch of Al Qaeda is very much a criminal enterprise. Not only does this branch have its roots in drug smuggling operations but it is mostly funded through kidnapping people. Most of their targets are western tourists, aid workers, or various western specialists brought in for one project or another. While the United States and the United Kingdom have long had a policy of refusing ransom, some European states will quietly pay ransoms to get their people back. I can understand why they do this but perhaps because I am thoroughly American, I find it short-sighted at best. Paying ransom encourages more kidnappings and in this case, helped the leaders of Al Qaeda gather men and weapons to attack Mali (It’s a tough call, to be honest. A country has to weigh its geopolitical interests against its duty to protect its citizens. I can understand why some countries come down the way the US doesn’t.). So the payments led to more pain and suffering, although I'll admit that I suspect that African pain and suffering would be met with a shrug by the European governments who made those payments (Honestly, I don’t think any western government really thinks about African pain and suffering…). Mr. Hammer also goes into some detail on how they allied with more secular Tuareg rebels. The Tuareg rebels have been fighting for centuries for their own homeland and the current conflicts are just another chapter in their quest for a state of their own. In all honesty, I would be very sympathetic to the Tuareg rebels in most circumstances but here they make a deal with the devil. So I can't muster up a lot of pity for them when they are inevitably burned and chased back to the deep desert. I have nothing but sympathy for the people who have to suffer the occupation and Mr. Hammer makes a point of showing us just what it was like using eyewitness testimony, in some cases from ex-Al Qaeda fighters. It's not enough for Al Qaeda troops to rule through terror and intimidation but they ban music (seizing the radio station and destroying all their records and cassettes for example) demanding nothing but Al Qaeda announcements and Quranic verses be broadcast. They even make a point to break up gatherings of families and friends, demanding everyone instead use that time to go home and study the Quran. This is something I see repeated across religious lines, whether it's Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim fanatics there's always this assault not just on art, music, and learning but this deep-seated hatred at the idea of joy, fellowship, or even simple human comfort (This life doesn’t matter much compared to the next, I think is the “logic”.). You can even see it in the toxic parts of pop culture fandoms at times! (Don’t even get me started on the basement CHUDs) This always comes up no matter how much they have to twist their own religious laws and instructions to do so as well, so I can only assume it's from some deep-seated flaw in humanity. I almost think that there’s some element in us that believes that happiness is a sign that we’re neglecting something. Look, wanting to reign back debauchery and abusive excess is a good and noble thing but if at any point you've made simple happiness and joy your enemy? You've become the bad guy. Write that on your hand folks, there will likely be a test at some point.

Mr. Hammer brings us a struggle between the scholars and the normal decent folks they serve and maniacs with a vision of a mono-ideological society that they're willing to kill to create that played out in recent history. While Dr. Haidara is not going to fit anyone's mold of an action hero, we're shown he's exactly the kind of hero you need in these situations. Because if you don't mind a mild spoiler he is wildly successful saving over 360,000 books and manuscripts from the hands of men who would burn them because the idea of making a space for ideas or new thoughts is so terrifying to them they would rather behave like monsters. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a look at the stubborn courage and decency of everyday men standing up for what is important to them. It's also an interesting, entertaining, and informative look at a part of the world and a part of history ignored by the West and challenges assumptions that have long been held in the West. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer gets an A. I recommend you give a look.

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Reference note http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6062360.stm BBC article mentioned in the review can be found here.