The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  Haidara searched for safe houses to store the manuscripts. Unsure what kind of reaction he would elicit, he first broached the subject with a female cousin who lived in a house near his in Bella Farandja. “Listen,” he told her. “I want to bring some trunks filled with manuscripts to your house, and I want you hide them there. It could be dangerous. Are you okay with it?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be? I’ll open everything for you,” she said. She led him to a storage room deep inside the house, filled with sacks of grain. “You are free to use this whenever you want.” He reached out to dozens of other relatives and friends. Not a single one, Haidara said, turned him down.

  At seven o’clock one evening in late April, Haidara, Mohammed Touré, and several other volunteers met in front of the Mamma Haidara Library and began the dangerous task of packing and moving the manuscripts. They had waited until an hour after dark—when they could work inside the library without attracting the scrutiny of the Islamic Police, who were always on the lookout for suspicious activities. That would give them exactly two hours before AQIM imposed its nightly nine p.m. curfew. Being caught on the streets after that hour, all of them knew, would earn them an interrogation by the Islamic Police and a whipping or imprisonment. Carrying two trunks, the men moved silently across the courtyard, entered the main building, and locked the doors behind them. The rebels had cut the electricity in Timbuktu at night, obliging them to use flashlights—only one or two to avoid drawing attention. Whispering among themselves in the darkness, and guided by the night watchman, they opened the cases in the main exhibition hall and delicately removed the volumes displayed inside. The flashlight beams cut through the darkness, reflecting off the exhibition glass, enveloping the men’s faces and the yellowing manuscripts in an eerie glow. Fearful of discovery but excited by the work, they passed the manuscripts down the line and laid them gently inside the footlockers.

  Into the trunks went some of the most valuable works in Abdel Kader’s collection. One prize was a tiny, irregularly shaped manuscript that glittered with illuminated blue Arabic letters and droplets of gold—a twelfth-century Koran written on the parchment of a fish, and a centerpiece of the Mamma Haidara collection for generations. There was a 254-page medical volume on surgery and elixirs derived from birds, lizards, and plants titled Remedies of Internal and External Maladies Affecting the Body, written in Timbuktu in 1684, shortly after the Moroccans ended their occupation and a second intellectual flowering began in the city. A 342-page, eighteenth-century manuscript with sparkling red-inked calligraphy and a fist-sized hole gouged out of it by termites had been selected for display by Haidara to show the extraordinary destructive power of these minute and sharp-jawed creatures. A Koran written in looping Maghrebi script with diagonal and vertical marginalia lay beside a book of Sufic philosophy opened to a cryptic black-and-white diagram. It consisted of eight concentric circles that compared the goodness and brilliance of the original Islamic thinkers to that of subsequent generations. Another prize of the Haidara collection, reflecting Haidara’s belief that Islam in its purist form was a religion of peace, was a manuscript on conflict resolution between the kingdoms of Borno and Sokoto in what is now Nigeria, the work of a Sufi holy warrior and intellectual who had briefly ruled Timbuktu in the mid-nineteenth century. He had been a jihadi, Haidara argued, in the original and best sense of the word: one who struggles against evil ideas, desire, and anger in himself and subjugates them to reason and obedience to God’s commands.

  After emptying the exhibition cases, they groped their way in the darkness down hallways, concerned that their flashlight beams would be seen by patrolling Islamic Police, and worked methodically in the conservation labs and library shelves where the bulk of the manuscripts were held. They kept close track of the time, limiting themselves to two hours, packing in as much as they could, often in silence, listening for every suspicious sound. The manuscripts ranged from miniature volumes the size of a contemporary mass-market paperback to large, encyclopedia-sized works, and required artfully arranging, in near-total darkness, to maximize the use of space, like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Because of the speed with which the volunteers were forced to work and the shortage of funding, they used no cushioning, no cardboard boxes, and no humidity traps to protect them from potential damage caused by squeezing and jostling. “The manuscripts are jam-packed in metal footlockers. This means that they are being subjected to risks of damage for lack of padding or protection from one another,” Emily Brady would explain in a Reddit-based plea for funding one year later. “Every time a footlocker is moved, the manuscripts rub against each other causing damage.”

  When they had finished the packing, they sealed the chests with padlocks, locked the door of the library behind them, and hurried home down shadowy alleys, keeping a sharp eye out for Islamic Police patrols. The following evening, they returned to the library, picked up the lockers, which now required two men to lift each one, wrapped them in blankets, and loaded them onto mule carts. The packing and transport continued across Timbuktu every evening over the following weeks, employing a total of twenty volunteers. Haidara told nobody outside his fellow librarians what he was doing—not even his immediate family. His wife and children noticed that he was going out every evening and returning late, but he shrugged off their queries. He didn’t want to give them additional reason to worry.

  One night a year after the evacuation, a guide led me through the rubbish-filled alleys around Timbuktu’s outdoor market to a rendezvous with a mule-cart driver who had participated in the operation. The skinny young man stood nervously in the street in the twilight and mumbled in broken French that he had picked up dozens of trunks from the Mamma Haidara and other libraries. “We moved them by night, always at night,” he told me, but declined to shed more details or even to give me his name; the occupation of Timbuktu by the jihadis was over, but Al Qaeda was still lurking in the desert just outside town, and nobody yet had the confidence to admit his role in Haidara’s secret smuggling operation. “I can’t say anything more,” he said, and slipped away in the darkness.

  In the busy hours between seven and nine at night, before curfew, when the streets were still full of pedestrians and traffic, and their transport would fit in with the bustle of ordinary Timbuktu life, this young man and many others led their donkeys through the sand, cart wheels creaking, and knocked on the doors of designated safe houses belonging to dozens of families connected to the Savama-DCI network. Everything had been prearranged: the mule-cart drivers, couriers, and hosts carried the footlockers by candlelight or flashlight down hallways and stacked them inside storage closets. “They were owners of libraries and their families—sisters, cousins, brothers, nephews. We used dozens of them,” Mohammed Touré said.

  At the end of May 2012, while the clandestine rescue was gathering momentum, Haidara traveled to Bamako for an emergency meeting with UNESCO. A dozen UNESCO officials, Mali’s minister of culture, and twenty reporters assembled in a conference room at the Ministry of Culture. With cameras and digital recorders on, Haidara was asked to discuss the peril facing Timbuktu’s manuscripts.

  Haidara refused to comment. “If I talk about the situation in front of you here, I could worsen the problem,” Haidara told the reporters. Drawing attention to the manuscripts, he argued, would remind the jihadis of their value. The radicals might hold them as bargaining chips or destroy them out of spite. When the meeting ended, the UNESCO delegates asked Haidara how they should proceed.

  “Stay silent,” Haidara advised. “Do nothing. Leave it in our hands.”

  Haidara decided, after days of reflection, to remain in Bamako. He insisted that it had nothing to do with his personal safety: in the entire month since the rebel takeover, he had not had a single encounter with Abou Zeid, Iyad Ag Ghali, or any other jihadi in the city. He had deliberately kept a low profile, and none of them had sought him out, or appeared to have noticed him. But he was finding it increasingly difficult to stay in t
ouch with his donors around the world, to keep them updated on the dangers in Timbuktu and to prepare them to donate money should the situation require it. Haidara had a second home in Bamako where he lived with his second wife, the Malian diplomat, whenever he came to the capital, but before the troubles started she had taken up an embassy position in Paris; he told her nothing about the rescue operation, determined to shield her from worry.

  Haidara designated Mohammed Touré his proxy in Timbuktu and settled into a drab rented apartment a few blocks from the Niger River, which soon became a refuge for relatives who had fled the north. (He felt it inappropriate to move into his second wife’s home with members of his first wife’s family.) Haidara brought down his three oldest children so that they could continue their education. Amid the insecurity and violence that had enveloped Timbuktu, many of the city’s teachers had fled, forcing their secondary schools to shut down. The children now shared space with their grandmother—the mother of Haidara’s first wife—and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. And the relatives kept coming. With the exception of two short visits to Timbuktu over the following six months, during which he quietly met with his nephew Mohammed Touré and others participating in the rescue, and gave them encouragement, Haidara would remain in Bamako until the end of the occupation.

  13

  On a windswept morning during the summer rainy season, Sane Chirfi Alpha, Timbuktu’s director of tourism and a member of the city’s Crisis Committee during the now-ended occupation, guided me in a four-wheel-drive over rolling dunes to the football-field-sized graveyard at the edge of the city, surrounded by a low orange wall perforated with ornamental, Moorish-style apertures. Clad in a white skullcap and white robe, Chirfi, a sad-faced and taciturn man in his forties, stepped out of our car, opened the padlocked gate with an iron key, and led me on foot across a field of mottled sand, barren except for a scattering of thorn trees. We threaded our way past overturned clay cisterns, pottery shards, stones, chunks of concrete with names and birth and death dates scratched into them, and other crude markers for the dead.

  Abruptly we arrived at a ten-foot-high pile of bricks, stones, and earth. There was nothing to suggest that it had been, until the previous year, the mausoleum of one of Timbuktu’s most revered saints, among 333 Islamic scholars—including several members of the Timbuktu resistance who were executed by the Moroccan invaders in front of the Djingareyber Mosque in 1591—viewed by the city’s residents as divine.

  On the 1st of July 2012, a Friday, Chirfi told me, dozens of Ansar Dine militants under the command of Iyad Ag Ghali blocked the entrances to this cemetery and a second one in Timbuktu with their vehicles. Ghali’s men approached the shrines, wielding pickaxes, hammers, and chisels, and, with cries of “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is the Greatest,” smashed them into rubble. The attack came a day after Ghali’s men had broken into the courtyard of the Djingareyber Mosque and knocked down three small mausoleums while the imam looked on in horror. Jihadi imams appeared on television and in Timbuktu’s mosques the day after the cemetery attacks and explained their actions to a shocked, demoralized population. “They said that saints are not acceptable in Islam,” Chirfi said, as the wind howled over this desolate sight. They made it clear that they would continue until all the shrines in Timbuktu were destroyed.

  The worship of saints and the construction of shrines had spread through much of the Islamic world following the death of the Prophet Mohammed, including Persia, Iraq, the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, and the Maghreb region of Africa. But it was not until the eighteenth century, when Muhammad Abd Al Wahhab, the spiritual mentor of Timbuktu’s jihadis, began his campaign of religious purification, that such rites and practices began to be seen as heretical. As part of his fanatical quest to drag Islam back to its seventh-century roots, Al Wahhab raged against prayers to the dead, worship at tombs and shrines, the veneration of saints, the erection of tombstones, even the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. Those who indulged in such practices, Al Wahhab preached, were guilty of idolatrous superstition, polytheism, and blasphemy, and deserved to be killed, their daughters and wives raped, and all of their possessions confiscated.

  Al Wahhab’s preachings drove his followers to carry out rampages that would inspire the jihadis centuries later in Timbuktu. In 1801, the Wahhabi forces of Abdul Aziz Ibn Muhammed Ibn Saud seized control of Najaf and Karbala, the two holiest cities in Shi’ite Islam, and destroyed the tomb of Hussein Ibn Ali, the grandson of Mohammed, and that of his father, Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet. Two years later, when the Saudis captured Mecca from the Arabian Hashemite clan, they destroyed a shrine above the tomb of the Prophet’s daughter Fatimah as well as the tomb of his first wife, Khadijah. “Beware of those who preceded you and used to take the graves of their prophets and righteous men as places of worship,” the Wahhabis declared, citing a Hadith, “but you must not take graves as mosques; I forbid you to do that.”

  For centuries the Sufis of Timbuktu had carried out their rites unmolested. Even under the yoke of the nineteenth-century jihadis, they had continued to enter these zawiya—simple mud huts bearing little ornamentation, except, perhaps, a carved wooden door and a bed of white linen draped over a bier—to commune with their local spirits, reciting certain prayers over and over, in a mystical ceremony called the dhikr. “We pray to them for everything we look for in life,” a seamstress would explain to an investigator from Human Rights Watch months after the 2012 attacks. “The barren pray to have children; the pregnant pray for a safe birth; mothers pray for their children to be healthy, safe, and marry a good man or woman. If you, or a family member, are to travel, we pray to deliver us safely home.”

  Weeks after demolishing the tombs of Sufi saints in emulation of Ibn Saud’s fanatical army, the jihadis consolidated their control over northern Mali. The Islamic militants had already outmaneuvered their secular Tuareg partners—implementing Shariah law against their wishes, pushing the Tuaregs to the outskirts of Timbuktu. But in Gao, the Tuareg rebels still clung to a modicum of power, occupying most major municipal buildings, including City Hall and the governor’s mansion overlooking the Niger River. Those days ended abruptly at the end of July.

  The spark occurred early one afternoon. A Tuareg rebel tried to steal a popular schoolteacher’s motorcycle on a street in Gao and, when the teacher resisted, shot him dead. Residents of Gao were already angered by an epidemic of looting carried out in late March and early April by the Tuareg occupiers. “Over the period of several days, the town of Gao was thoroughly, systematically, and comprehensively pillaged—the government offices, banks, schools, hospitals, and churches, the warehouses and offices of international humanitarian organizations, the houses of government officials,” a Gao resident told Human Rights Watch. “Everything that the state and residents of Gao had worked to construct for the benefit of the population was stripped away in a matter of days.” Now enraged crowds gathered at the gates of the governor’s mansion, demanding that the Tuareg commanders turn over the murderer. Panicky Tuareg snipers fired from the villa’s windows on the protesters, killing several. The Islamists seized on popular outrage and launched an attack against the Tuaregs, killing twenty-eight and driving them out of their strongholds in Gao after a day of fierce street fighting. The Tuareg rebels fled into the desert.

  At their bases at Timbuktu’s airport and harbor, the Tuaregs watched in terror. “We knew we would be next,” said Yusuf, the young fighter I met at his mother’s house on the outskirts of the city. Yusuf and hundreds of his comrades slipped from the city in a disorganized retreat, grimly aware that they had been humiliated and rendered powerless by their jihadi partners.

  The vision of an independent Tuareg homeland that had inspired three generations of rebels, and that these men had realized for a brief and euphoric moment, in northern Mali in April, lay in ruins. “We lost our dream of Azawad,” said Yusuf, who fled by motorbike to a refugee camp in Mauritania, where he joined tens of thousands of norther
n civilians who had escaped from the very depredations that Yusuf and his fellow rebels had inflicted. Until this point the Tuaregs, who had little tolerance for Salafism, had kept the radicals’ most extreme impulses in check. With the Tuaregs gone, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar Dine now felt free to turn the clocks back fourteen hundred years.

  In a violent repudiation of his former life, Ghali declared war on the north’s musicians. “We do not want Satan’s music,” a spokesman for Ansar Dine declared in August 2012. “In its place there will be Koranic verses. Shariah demands this. We must do what God commands.” Ghali’s jihadis destroyed instruments and sound equipment, and burned down rudimentary recording studios. In Niafounké, a Niger River town forty miles upstream from Timbuktu, and the home of the late desert-blues master Ali Farka Touré, jihadis threatened to chop off the fingers of Touré’s protegés if they were caught so much as lifting a guitar. Ahmed Ag Kaedi, a Tuareg camel herder who doubled as the lead guitarist of Amanar, a Tinariwen-inspired group from Kidal, returned from visiting his camels in the bush in August 2012 to find his house vandalized and his musical equipment destroyed. Ansar Dine militants “saw my sound system and my instruments and they poured fuel on them and set them on fire,” he recounted. “They talked to my sister and said, ‘When Ahmed comes back tell him [that if] he plays music in Kidal again, we will come back and cut off his fingers.’ ”