“Timbuktu without its manuscripts is like a man without his lungs” -Sane Chirfi Alpha

“Timbuktu without its manuscripts is like a man without his lungs”

-Sane Chirfi Alpha

The Timbuktu manuscripts are a corpus of up to 700.000 manuscripts on topics like philosophy, poetry, history, science, Islamic law, conflict resolution and medicine as well as Quranic manuscripts, dating from the 13th to the early 20th century. They are written in Arabic, as well as regional languages using Ajami scripts adapted from Arabic.

Timbuktu has experienced considerable hardships in recent years, including attempts by Ansar Dine, an Islamist insurgent group active in the Sahel, to eradicate the city's literary heritage. As in centuries past, when Timbuktu's scholarly traditions were periodically under threat, valuable books were diligently hidden, or smuggled out of the city by their caretakers, to avoid destruction.

Although copies and translations are incredibly hard to come by, 40.000 manuscripts from private collections and libraries in Timbuktu have now been digitized and made publicly available by the efforts of people like Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara and SAVAMA-DCI. They can be explored through Google Arts and Culture here: https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/the-timbuktu-manuscripts/BQE6pL2U3Qsu2A