Topic: Timbuktu Manuscripts Posted: 21-Aug-2007 at 21:44
By LYDIA POLGREEN Published: August 7, 2007
TIMBUKTU,
Mali Ismal Diadi Hadara held a treasure in his slender fingers
that has somehow endured through 11 generations a square of battered
leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side
reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient
origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.
A copy of the Koran from the 12th century. According to notes in the text, it was bought for a Moroccan king for a sum of gold. This is our familys story, he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. It was written in 1519.
The
musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid
Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten
outposts future.
A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden
for centuries in houses along Timbuktus dusty streets and in leather
trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu a city whose
name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere may once again claim a
place at the intellectual heart of Africa.
I am a historian,
Mr. Hadara said. I know from my research that great cities seldom get
a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to
our past.
This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless
sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea
over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge
of a renaissance.
said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a
government-run library in Timbuktu. This is our chance to regain our
place in history.
The South African government is building a
new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will
house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their
contents available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities
and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have
poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the citys musty family
libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research
institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate
and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.
The Libyan
government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a
luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktus only swimming pool
and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also
digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of
Timbuktu.
Timbuktus new seekers have a variety of motives.
South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage,
each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links
to some of the history stored here, while American charities began
giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of
African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary
series in the late 1990s.
This new chapter in the story of
Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is
almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it.
The geography
that has doomed Timbuktu to obscurity in the popular imagination for
half a millennium was once the reason for its greatness. It was founded
as a trading post by nomads in the 11th century and later became part
of the vast Mali Empire, then ultimately came under the control of the
Songhai Empire.
For centuries it flourished because it sat
between the great superhighways of the era the Sahara, with its
caravan routes carrying salt, cloth, spices and other riches from the
north, and the Niger River, which carried gold and slaves from the rest
of West Africa.
Traders brought books and manuscripts from
across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and books were bought and
sold in Timbuktu in Arabic and local languages like Songhai and
Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg people.
Timbuktu was home
to the University of Sankore, which at its height had 25,000 scholars.
An army of scribes, gifted in calligraphy, earned their living copying
the manuscripts brought by travelers. Prominent families added those
copies to their own libraries. As a result, Timbuktu became a
repository of an extensive and eclectic collection of manuscripts.
Astronomy,
botany, pharmacology, geometry, geography, chemistry, biology, said
Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, the descendant of a family of imams that keeps
a vast library in one of the citys mosques. There is Islamic law,
family law, womens rights, human rights, laws regarding livestock,
childrens rights. All subjects under the sun, they are represented
here.
One 19th-century book on Islamic practices gives advice
on menstruation. A medical text suggests using toad meat to treat snake
bites, and droppings from panthers mixed with butter to soothe boils.
There are thousands of Korans and books on Islamic law, as well as
decorated biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, some dating back a
millennium, complete with diagrams of his shoes.
Ancient Manuscripts From the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu (Library of Congress)
Mr.
Hadara is a descendant of the Kati family, a prominent Muslim family
in Toledo, Spain. One of his ancestors fled religious persecution in
the 15th century and settled in what is now Mali, bringing his
formidable library with him. The Kati family intermarried into the
Songhai imperial family, and the habit Mr. Hadaras ancestors had of
doodling notes in the margins of their manuscripts has left an
abundance of historical information: births and deaths in the imperial
family, the weather, drafts of imperial letters, herbal cures, records
of slaves, and salt and gold traded.
Moroccan invaders deposed
the Songhai empire in 1591, and the new rulers were hostile to the
community of scholars, who were seen as malcontents. Facing
persecution, many fled, taking many books with them.
West
African sea routes overtook the importance of the old inland desert and
river trade, and the city began its long decline. When the first
European explorers stumbled across the once fabled city, they were
stunned at its decrepitude. Ren Cailli, a French explorer who arrived
here in 1828, said it was a mass of ill-looking houses built of
earth.
Mr. Caillis description remains accurate today. For
all its vaunted legend, Timbuktu remains a collection of low mud houses
along narrow, trash-choked streets backed by sand dunes, difficult to
reach and unimpressive on first sight. In 1990, Unesco designated it an
endangered site because sand dunes threatened to swallow it.
Many
tourists who come here stay for just a day, long enough to buy a
T-shirt and get their passports stamped at the local tourism office as
proof they have been to the end of the earth. In a recent Internet
campaign to choose the new seven wonders of the world, Timbuktu failed
to make the cut, much to the chagrin of the citys tour guides and
boosters.
Yet the city has been making a slow comeback for
years. Its manuscripts, long hidden, began to emerge in the mid-20th
century, as Mali won its independence from France and the city was
declared a Unesco world heritage site.
The government created
an institute named after Ahmed Baba, Timbuktus greatest scholar, to
collect, preserve and interpret the manuscripts. Abdel Kader Hadara,
no relation of Ismal Diadi Hadara, an Islamic scholar whose family
owned an extensive collection of manuscripts, started an organization
called Savama-DCI dedicated to preserving the manuscripts. After a
visit from Mr. Gates in 1997, he was able to get help from American
charities to support private family libraries. With the support of the
Ford and Mellon foundations, families began to catalog and preserve
their collections.
But time, scorching desert heat, termites
and sandstorms have taken a toll on the manuscripts. Most were locked
in trunks or kept on dusty shelves for centuries, and their pages are
brittle and crumbling, waterlogged and termite-eaten. In the village of
Ber, two hours of dusty track east of Timbuktu, Fida Ag Mohammed tends
to several trunks of manuscripts that have been in his family, a line
of Tuareg imams, for centuries.
This is a biography of the
Prophet Muhammad, he said, gingerly lifting one manuscript bound in
crumbling leather. It is from the 13th century.
The neat
lines of Arabic script were clearly legible, but the edges of many
pages had crumbled away, the words trailing off into nothingness.
Savama
is in the process of building a new mud-brick library for Mr.
Mohammeds books, but until it is ready he has no means to preserve his
manuscripts. To rescue their contents, if not their physical substance,
he was copying the most fragile texts by hand, using an ink he makes
himself out of gum.
Now, when the scorching heat of the day
eases, a favored sunset activity in Timbuktu is watching the Libyan
earthmovers dig the new canal. Like tiny toy trucks in a giant sandbox,
they push mountains of sand to coax the Niger to flow here, bringing
more water and new life to the dune-surrounded city.
To see
this machine makes me more happy because it means things are changing
in Timbuktu, said Sidi Muhammad, a 40-year-old Koranic scholar,
splayed on a dune with a group of friends, gossiping and fingering
their prayer beads.
The Malian government has encouraged
Islamic learning to flourish here once again, and there are dozens of
Koranic schools where children and adults learn to read and recite the
Koran. Training programs are teaching men and women how to classify,
interpret and translate the documents, as well as preserve them for
future study.
Abdel Kader Hadara, who in many ways started
the renaissance by wandering the desert in search of manuscripts,
persuading families to allow their treasures to see the light of day,
said Timbuktus best days lie ahead of it.
"Timbuktu is like a mirage; it is a small dusty town of mud brick houses
deep in the Sub-Saharan desert of West Africa that nobody would expect
to hold thousands of valuable, ancient Islamic manuscripts, each
documenting the limits of human knowledge a thousand years ago. But
Timbuktu is not only an Islamic centre of civilisation; its an African
centre of civilisation, which an increasing number of historians and
archaeologists working in and around the town are beginning to believe
rivals ancient Rome or Athens. As if a paradox, the worldwide interest
Timbuktu has elicited arrives at a time when the Christian and Islamic
Worlds look certain to collide."
Excellent finally. SOmething on real sub saharan African history. It will unfortunatly have to be done away with unless the code is followed with regards to copy paste.
1) Plz place the content in quotes or highlight
2) Give your own comments, if the paste is the arguement itself then it will be deleted.
"11. Plagiarism, the posting of texts found elsewhere without naming either author or source. Posting your own personal commentary is encouraged when copy/pasting from another source. When pasting attempt to place the content in quotes, highlight or underline for presentation purposes. Provide a correct URL link. When referencing from books or periodicals provide the title of the reference, the author and publication date. Posts where the paste is the arguement itself, while not adhering to these requirements, will be deleted."
Joined: 14-Sep-2006
Location: United States
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 28
Posted: 22-Aug-2007 at 06:15
Originally posted by Almazy
By LYDIA POLGREEN Published: August 7, 2007
TIMBUKTU,
Mali Ismal Diadi Hadara held a treasure in his slender fingers
that has somehow endured through 11 generations a square of battered
leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side
reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient
origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.
A copy of the Koran from the 12th century. According to notes in the text, it was bought for a Moroccan king for a sum of gold. This is our familys story, he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. It was written in 1519.
The
musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid
Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten
outposts future.
A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden
for centuries in houses along Timbuktus dusty streets and in leather
trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu a city whose
name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere may once again claim a
place at the intellectual heart of Africa.
I am a historian,
Mr. Hadara said. I know from my research that great cities seldom get
a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to
our past.
This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless
sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea
over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge
of a renaissance.
said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a
government-run library in Timbuktu. This is our chance to regain our
place in history.
The South African government is building a
new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will
house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their
contents available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities
and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have
poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the citys musty family
libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research
institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate
and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.
The Libyan
government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a
luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktus only swimming pool
and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also
digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of
Timbuktu.
Timbuktus new seekers have a variety of motives.
South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage,
each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links
to some of the history stored here, while American charities began
giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of
African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary
series in the late 1990s.
This new chapter in the story of
Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is
almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it.
The geography
that has doomed Timbuktu to obscurity in the popular imagination for
half a millennium was once the reason for its greatness. It was founded
as a trading post by nomads in the 11th century and later became part
of the vast Mali Empire, then ultimately came under the control of the
Songhai Empire.
For centuries it flourished because it sat
between the great superhighways of the era the Sahara, with its
caravan routes carrying salt, cloth, spices and other riches from the
north, and the Niger River, which carried gold and slaves from the rest
of West Africa.
Traders brought books and manuscripts from
across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and books were bought and
sold in Timbuktu in Arabic and local languages like Songhai and
Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg people.
Timbuktu was home
to the University of Sankore, which at its height had 25,000 scholars.
An army of scribes, gifted in calligraphy, earned their living copying
the manuscripts brought by travelers. Prominent families added those
copies to their own libraries. As a result, Timbuktu became a
repository of an extensive and eclectic collection of manuscripts.
Astronomy,
botany, pharmacology, geometry, geography, chemistry, biology, said
Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, the descendant of a family of imams that keeps
a vast library in one of the citys mosques. There is Islamic law,
family law, womens rights, human rights, laws regarding livestock,
childrens rights. All subjects under the sun, they are represented
here.
One 19th-century book on Islamic practices gives advice
on menstruation. A medical text suggests using toad meat to treat snake
bites, and droppings from panthers mixed with butter to soothe boils.
There are thousands of Korans and books on Islamic law, as well as
decorated biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, some dating back a
millennium, complete with diagrams of his shoes.
Ancient Manuscripts From the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu (Library of Congress)
Mr.
Hadara is a descendant of the Kati family, a prominent Muslim family
in Toledo, Spain. One of his ancestors fled religious persecution in
the 15th century and settled in what is now Mali, bringing his
formidable library with him. The Kati family intermarried into the
Songhai imperial family, and the habit Mr. Hadaras ancestors had of
doodling notes in the margins of their manuscripts has left an
abundance of historical information: births and deaths in the imperial
family, the weather, drafts of imperial letters, herbal cures, records
of slaves, and salt and gold traded.
Moroccan invaders deposed
the Songhai empire in 1591, and the new rulers were hostile to the
community of scholars, who were seen as malcontents. Facing
persecution, many fled, taking many books with them.
West
African sea routes overtook the importance of the old inland desert and
river trade, and the city began its long decline. When the first
European explorers stumbled across the once fabled city, they were
stunned at its decrepitude. Ren Cailli, a French explorer who arrived
here in 1828, said it was a mass of ill-looking houses built of
earth.
Mr. Caillis description remains accurate today. For
all its vaunted legend, Timbuktu remains a collection of low mud houses
along narrow, trash-choked streets backed by sand dunes, difficult to
reach and unimpressive on first sight. In 1990, Unesco designated it an
endangered site because sand dunes threatened to swallow it.
Many
tourists who come here stay for just a day, long enough to buy a
T-shirt and get their passports stamped at the local tourism office as
proof they have been to the end of the earth. In a recent Internet
campaign to choose the new seven wonders of the world, Timbuktu failed
to make the cut, much to the chagrin of the citys tour guides and
boosters.
Yet the city has been making a slow comeback for
years. Its manuscripts, long hidden, began to emerge in the mid-20th
century, as Mali won its independence from France and the city was
declared a Unesco world heritage site.
The government created
an institute named after Ahmed Baba, Timbuktus greatest scholar, to
collect, preserve and interpret the manuscripts. Abdel Kader Hadara,
no relation of Ismal Diadi Hadara, an Islamic scholar whose family
owned an extensive collection of manuscripts, started an organization
called Savama-DCI dedicated to preserving the manuscripts. After a
visit from Mr. Gates in 1997, he was able to get help from American
charities to support private family libraries. With the support of the
Ford and Mellon foundations, families began to catalog and preserve
their collections.
But time, scorching desert heat, termites
and sandstorms have taken a toll on the manuscripts. Most were locked
in trunks or kept on dusty shelves for centuries, and their pages are
brittle and crumbling, waterlogged and termite-eaten. In the village of
Ber, two hours of dusty track east of Timbuktu, Fida Ag Mohammed tends
to several trunks of manuscripts that have been in his family, a line
of Tuareg imams, for centuries.
This is a biography of the
Prophet Muhammad, he said, gingerly lifting one manuscript bound in
crumbling leather. It is from the 13th century.
The neat
lines of Arabic script were clearly legible, but the edges of many
pages had crumbled away, the words trailing off into nothingness.
Savama
is in the process of building a new mud-brick library for Mr.
Mohammeds books, but until it is ready he has no means to preserve his
manuscripts. To rescue their contents, if not their physical substance,
he was copying the most fragile texts by hand, using an ink he makes
himself out of gum.
Now, when the scorching heat of the day
eases, a favored sunset activity in Timbuktu is watching the Libyan
earthmovers dig the new canal. Like tiny toy trucks in a giant sandbox,
they push mountains of sand to coax the Niger to flow here, bringing
more water and new life to the dune-surrounded city.
To see
this machine makes me more happy because it means things are changing
in Timbuktu, said Sidi Muhammad, a 40-year-old Koranic scholar,
splayed on a dune with a group of friends, gossiping and fingering
their prayer beads.
The Malian government has encouraged
Islamic learning to flourish here once again, and there are dozens of
Koranic schools where children and adults learn to read and recite the
Koran. Training programs are teaching men and women how to classify,
interpret and translate the documents, as well as preserve them for
future study.
Abdel Kader Hadara, who in many ways started
the renaissance by wandering the desert in search of manuscripts,
persuading families to allow their treasures to see the light of day,
said Timbuktus best days lie ahead of it.
"Timbuktu is like a mirage; it is a small dusty town of mud brick houses
deep in the Sub-Saharan desert of West Africa that nobody would expect
to hold thousands of valuable, ancient Islamic manuscripts, each
documenting the limits of human knowledge a thousand years ago. But
Timbuktu is not only an Islamic centre of civilisation; its an African
centre of civilisation, which an increasing number of historians and
archaeologists working in and around the town are beginning to believe
rivals ancient Rome or Athens. As if a paradox, the worldwide interest
Timbuktu has elicited arrives at a time when the Christian and Islamic
Worlds look certain to collide."
After a failuer to provide the requested source, the topic has been locked. Let this be a lesson to all of you, the new rules in the code were placed after much considerations and if they are not followed, action will be taken, no matter how interesting the subject matter.
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