![]() ![]() ![]() “After that, they took away rubber bags containing some documents and went to an unknown place,” he said. Local resident Ibrahim Ag Nita described the scene: “Two days ago, some Ansar al-Din and al-Qaeda elements entered the Documents Centre at Ahmed Baba Institute and told the attendees that the Islamic Sharia only approves of Islamic religious books because they help boost doctrine, and that books of other sciences, such as math, astronomy and other sciences, are not useful to Muslims and must be removed.” “However, the takeover of the city by the extremist Islamic groups has put an end to the arrival of European tourists and made me hide these documents lest I should be forced to destroy or turn them in to them.” “They consider these documents to be a heresy and believe that preserving them is some sort of worship, which contradicts the Islamic Sharia in their opinion,” he concluded. ![]() “I’m proud of the documents I own because they contain many sciences,” he said. Moussa Ag Hamta, owner of a private library, told Magharebia that the concerns of the UNESCO Director-General were shared by the residents of Timbuktu who link their history to these historical centres. These documents, she said, date back to “Timbuktu’s golden period of glory between the 12th and 15th centuries” and cover subjects “from religious studies to mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and music”. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Director-General Irina Bokova on Tuesday (April 17th) appealed to Mali’s neighbours to help prevent any looting or destruction of Timbuktu’s centuries-old cultural heritage: “Reports about the rebel takeover of Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research (IHERI-AB) and other cultural institutions are cause for great alarm.” “These centres contain ancient documents, written or copied locally, and others written in Morocco, Andalusia or some African countries, or sent to Timbuktu by pilgrims from distant Islamic lands hundreds of years ago,” Bokova added. 11 that drove fighters from the Islamist alliance occupying Mali's north back back into the desert and mountains near the Algeria border.įrench troops have taken control of the airport in the northern Malian town of Kidal, the last rebel stronghold in the north.Citizens of Timbuktu, Mali’s historic city and the legendary UNESCO World Heritage Site, are rallying to protect ancient documents dating back to the Golden Age of the 12th and 15th centuries that officials fear may be looted or trafficked under the current occupation by Tuareg groups. Timbuktu was liberated by French and Malian forces as part of a rapid French-led military offensive launched on Jan. The Ahmed Baba Institute, a Malian state library, is named after a Timbuktu-born contemporary of William Shakespeare and housed more than 20,000 ancient scholarly manuscripts. Some experts compare them in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some of the mansuscripts that constitute Timbuktu's "treasure of learning" date back to the 13th century.īrittle, written in ornate calligraphy, and ranging from scholarly treatises to old commercial invoices, the documents represent a compendium of human knowledge on everything from law, sciences and medicine to history and politics. The Malian source, asking not to be named, said the manuscripts had been concealed "a little bit everywhere". "They had shipped them out and distributed them around," Jeppie said. The two sources said that soon after Tuareg rebel fighters swept into Timbuktu on April 1 in a rebellion later hijacked by sharia-observing Islamist radicals, curators and collectors of the manuscripts had hidden the texts away for safety. "I can say that the vast majority of the collections appear from our reports not to have been destroyed, damaged or harmed in any way," Cape Town University's Professor Shamil Jeppie, an expert on the Saharan city's manuscripts, told Reuters.Ī Malian source also directly involved with the conservation of the Timbuktu manuscripts told Reuters 95 percent of the total documents were "safe and sound". After French and Malian troops on Sunday retook Timbuktu, a UNESCO World Heritage site and ancient seat of Islamic learning, from Islamist insurgent occupiers, the city's mayor reported the fleeing rebels had set fire to a major manuscript library.īut experts said that while up to 2,000 manuscripts may have been lost at the South African-funded Ahmed Baba Institute ransacked by the rebels, the bulk of the around 300,000 texts existing in Timbuktu and its surrounding region were believed to be safe.
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