University of Timbuktu

6 Key excerpts on "University of Timbuktu"

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  eBook - ePub

  Babel Unbound

  Rage, reason and rethinking public life

  • Rory Bester, Anthea Garman, Indra de Lanerolle, Susana Molins Lliteras, Nomusa Makhubu, Litheko Modisane, Pascal Newbourne Mwale, Camalita Naicker, Lesley Cowling, Carolyn Hamilton, Lesley Cowling, Carolyn Hamilton(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wits University Press

    (Publisher)

  There was a will to establish the truth about the pre-colonial past and to restore and acknowledge African contributions to human civilisation. 89 Thus, the insertion of the ‘Timbuktu archive’ into this public discourse about history was not surprising. As De Moraes Farias argues, the Sahel has always been a place for the formulation and reformulation of notions of African identity, since as a region it offers concrete proofs of the historical richness of Africa and thus has great symbolic value. 90 Mbeki in his ‘African Renaissance Statement’ (13 August 1998) drew on the iconic value of Timbuktu: ‘As we recall with pride the African scholar and author of the Middle Ages, Sadi of Timbuktu, who had mastered such subjects as law, logic, dialectics, grammar and rhetoric, and other African intellectuals who taught at the University of Timbuktu, we must ask the question – where are African intellectuals today?’ 91 The language of the discourse refers as much to the past as to the present. The idea of ‘renaissance’ implies a process of greatness-decay-recovery in the present, which always runs the risk of mystifying the past. 92 In incorporating Timbuktu to the ‘African Renaissance’ discourse, much of its uniqueness is masked by the homogeneity of the rhetoric. 93 For example, the notion of the ‘University of Timbuktu’ used by Mbeki in his speech and widespread in public discourse obscures the unique nature and traditions of higher knowledge production and transmission in the region, which were not institutionally centred, as medieval European universities were, nor based on the Islamic model of pious endowments (waqf) attached to mosques in the other Islamic regions. 94 It seems that the model of higher Islamic education widespread in Timbuktu and the West African region was based on a network of (sometimes mobile) scholars and the learning circles organised around them, perhaps sharing a common ‘core curriculum’

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  West African Culture Dynamics

  Archaeological and Historical Perspectives

  • B. K. Swartz, Raymond E. Dumett, B. K. Swartz, Raymond E. Dumett(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Timbuktu: A Case Study of the Role of Legend in History EUGENIA HERBERT Wide Afric, doth thy sun Lighten, thy hills enfold a city as fair As those which starr'd the night o' the elder world? Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo A dream as frail as those of ancient time? T E N N Y S O N , Timbuctoo ( 1 8 2 9 ) Certain cities have long captured the popular, poetic, and even scholarly imagination. Ophir, Golconda, El Dorado, Samarkand, and the Seven Cities of Cibola conjure visions of untold if elusive wealth. Timbuktu was once part of this legendary company: for centuries it was the symbol of Africa's splendor and golden joys, but it is now merely a byword for remoteness. Timbuktu was important not only as an entrepot and terminus for the caravan trade of the Sahara. It was a focal point for many of the major cross-currents of Sudanese history: the march of Islam, ethnic migrations, the rise and fall of the great Sudanic political systems, early European explorations, the gold trade, and imperialism. This paper surveys what is known of the historical Timbuktu, emphasizing its mediating position between the economic and cultural systems of North and West Africa. It then explores the phenomenon of its continuing fame, a fame that refused to die even in the centuries of relative eclipse following the Moroccan invasion in 1591. The final sections of the paper reveal how the myth of Timbuktu served as a major catalyst for the European exploration and conquest of the Sudan in the nineteenth century. THE HISTORICAL TIMBUKTU, 1100-1590 Timbuktu was founded about A . D . 1100 by Tuareg nomads from Arawan, 4 3 2 EUGENIA HERBERT who brought their flocks south to graze along the Niger in the summer. According to one tradition, Timbuktu was the name of an old female slave to whom they confided their belongings when they returned home.

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  BK SMUGGLERS OF TIMBUKTU EB

  • Charlie English(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • William Collins

    (Publisher)

  A fter the discovery and translation of the Timbuktu chronicles, the story of the mythologized city began to settle in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though it was still easy to find academics writing of Malian expeditions to America, or of the twenty-five thousand students who attended Timbuktu University during the Sudanese Middle Ages, a small but growing band of professional Africanists chipped away at the myths in the hope of producing an objective truth. The history was remarkable enough, after all, not to require further elaboration. What was left—the “vulgate,” orthodox account of Timbuktu and the Songhay—was based on the chronicles and the Songhay king lists they related, from the Zuwa dynasty to the askiyas via Sunni Ali Kulun and his successors. These details, historians could broadly agree, were facts.

  Toward the end of 1967, UNESCO organized a meeting of experts on the manuscripts of West Africa in Timbuktu, in the newly independent state of Mali. Among the guests was the man who would be known as the doyen of Timbuktu manuscripts experts, John Hunwick. The meeting recommended—and in Hunwick’s view it was “little more than a pious hope”—that a research institute be established at Timbuktu to collect and preserve the Islamic heritage of the region. A name was even suggested for it: the Ahmad Baba center. Within ten years, rather to Hunwick’s surprise, such an institution had been founded. Mali now had its own internationally recognized program devoted to researching the region’s past through its documents.

  By 1992, when Hunwick returned to hunt for copies of the Tarikh al-sudan for a new English translation he was preparing, the institute had made further advances: it now boasted a manuscript restoration department and a section where the works could be transferred to microfiche. It also had a growing number of documents—more than 6,300—as well as a small library of printed works. Hunwick found it “difficult to do justice to the richness of the collection,” he wrote. Most of the items were of local authorship and fell into two broad categories: items of “literary” character, including religious treatises, chronicles, and poems; and items of “documentary” character—letters, legal documents, manuscripts relating to the renting of houses, inheritance schedules, land ownership, and so on.

  Among the literary works, Hunwick listed two copies each of the Tarikh al-sudan and the Tarikh al-fattash . There were also histories of Azawad and the Barabish people, and of the ancient trading town of Tadmakkat. There were biographical dictionaries, as well as a history of the wars between the Tuareg and the French; and a copy of the anonymous Diwan al-muluk

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  Information Science

  The Basics

  • Judith Pintar, David Hopping(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 COLLECTING INFORMATION

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003155119-1

  In the summer of 2012 in the city of Timbuktu, a library housing hundreds of thousands of rare, handwritten manuscripts was threatened by an Al Qaeda-allied terrorist group intent on burning it to the ground. Nearly a half-century earlier, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had helped to create the Mamma Haidara Institute, named after a self-taught scholar whose family had been collecting manuscripts since the 15th century. Haidara’s son, Abdel Kader Haidara, inherited the family mission, sought professional training, and continued the effort, shared by many others, to locate and preserve the manuscripts that are the priceless heritage of the nation of Mali.1

  Timbuktu was founded in the 11th and 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes. By the 15th century the city had become a trading center on the trans-Saharan caravan route, and by the 16th had a thriving intellectual community centered around a mosque and a university that attracted scholars from across Africa and the known world. The city’s collections, written mostly in Arabic, contained works of broad and liberal subject matter, from history to theology, to astronomy to poetry. Even when the city’s geopolitical prominence waned, these manuscripts were preserved, copied, and held by the city’s first families, which passed them down through the generations in their private homes.

  There had been enough warning of the impending attack that the institute’s librarians, with the help of friends, family members, and library volunteers, were able to secretly pack thousands of items from the collections into small metal boxes before the library was destroyed.2 The boxes were moved via donkey cart and ATV, by twos and threes, hidden under fruit and vegetable crates, and then transported by bus, truck, or canoe along the Niger River to Mali’s capital city, Bamako, or to safe houses throughout the region. Reports vary, but it is possible that as many as 300,000 manuscripts were saved.3

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  The Southern Shores of the Mediterranean and its Networks

  Knowledge, Trade, Culture and People

  • Patricia Lorcin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Tarikhs (Chronicles) that were produced in Timbuktu or by writers associated with Timbuktu have played a major role in making the town known as having been a place of scholarship.

  Then there is the name of Ahmad Baba, the prolific and famous scholar, who longed for the town of his birth while in captivity in Marrakesh. His ancestral origins were elsewhere and his most productive scholarship happened while he was in exile but Timbuktu held his affections. Traditions of learning were part of the history of the town and they were kept as part of the ethos and mythology of the place even when it was overrun by conquerors and the scholars were few and far between. The learning combined oral transmission of knowledge and reading and writing, so even when book production was low studies continued through speaking and listening. The manuscript tradition has become in the past few decades the pride of the town’s intellectual legacy and its collective history (Jeppie and Diagne 2008).

  Bul’arāf can be placed into this long tradition and he was a kind of transitional figure in it. He was the ‘modern’ figure and, from all accounts, a pioneer in the town’s history because of his work on multiple fronts to both revitalise and conserve the manuscript book arts of the town. His labours, of course, interestingly coincided with the growth of printed books reaching the Sahel. It runs parallel to nearly the entirety of the French colonial period with its postal system and other innovations. The overwhelming weight of handwritten books and other materials today easily lead one to forget more than a century of printing in the region. There was no aversion to print; no fatwa against its use has been found. Bul’arāf’s manuscript copying project was not a reaction against technological innovation and modernity. We have yet to find a text questioning the permissibility of printing, or on the other hand a text promoting its uses. Bul’arāf’s library held printed books; among them was Kitāb al-Sībawayhi, two volumes, published in Paris in 1885. This was a classic work of Arabic grammar. He also arranged for the printing of local works.8

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  The Walking Qur'an

  Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

  • Rudolph T. Ware III(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  35 Both chronicles make it clear that the town’s best and brightest scholars during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were black.

  The embodiment of this early black tradition of scholarship was Muḥ ammad al-Kā barī (d. 1450). Moodibo Muḥ ammad was likely of Fulɓ e, Soninke, or perhaps even Mandingo background. Like many West Africans, he may well have been of mixed-ethnic parentage. Whatever the case, he was very clearly dark-skinned, according to al-Saʿ adi, and just as clearly the most famous teacher of the early fifteenth century in Timbuktu.

  Among the revered men of Sankore was this shaykh, I mean the

  faqī h

  Moodibo Muḥ ammad al-Kā barī the pre-eminent shaykh. . . . He settled in Timbuktu in the middle of the ninth century [A.H.] . . . and was the contemporary of many shaykhs there. Among them [was] the jurist Sī dī ʿ Abdul-Rahmā n al-Tamī mī . . . . Moodibo Muḥ ammad al-Kā barī attained the very pinnacle of scholarship and righteousness and was the teacher of the jurist ʿ Umar b. Muḥ ammad Aqī t and Sī dī Yaḥ yā [al-Tadillisī ]. . . . So numerous were his students, it is said, that he let no month go by without one of them finishing with him a reading of the

  Tahdhī b

  of al-Barā dhʿ ī (d. 1039). At that time the town was full of

  sū dā nī

  [black] students, people of the west who excelled in scholarship and righteousness. People even say that interred with him in his mausoleum (

  rawḍ a

  ), there are thirty men of Kā bara, all scholars and saints.36

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