Timbuktu manuscripts definition8/1/2023 Thinking fast, Touré, who is well grounded in Islamic studies, cited hadiths and Koranic verses stating that incontrovertible proof of a misdeed was required before punishment was meted out. "They had already started chopping off hands in public places." "I risked losing my hand, my foot," Touré said. He was charged with theft, a serious crime under sharia. Islamic police arrested the curator and and dragged him to the commissariat of the Islamic police. "He said, 'You're stealing them,'" Touré recalled one recent afternoon in the Malian capital of Bamako. Hamaha shone a flashlight in Touré's face and demanded that he open the chest. One night when he was leaving work with a trunk full of manuscripts destined for hiding, Touré came face-to-face with Oumar Ould Hamaha, one of AQIM's most inflexible zealots. ![]() There were many close calls, including one involving Haidara's nephew, Mohammed Touré, a 25-year-old curator at the library. Over nine traumatic months, Haidara and his team rescued 350,000 manuscripts from 45 different libraries in and around Timbuktu and hid them in Bamako, more than 400 miles from the AQIM-controlled north. Kant and Hegel and Hume did not know anything about this." So the presence of these books had high, high stakes, going back to the 18th century. "The absence of writing, of books, was seen as a reflection of the subhuman position of the Africans. "And unless you have those, you are not a civilization, which was a pernicious argument that provided justification for the slave trade," Gates said in a recent interview. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who visited Timbuktu and Haidara in 1996, explains that Hegel, Kant, and other Enlightenment philosophers contended that Africa had no tradition of writing, and therefore no history and no memory. The extremists' inroads, militarily and culturally, held a sad irony: Haidara as a scholar and community leader had made it his life's work to document, as never before, Mali's achievements as an ancient center of progressive thought, including Islamic teachings that were anathema to the fanaticism that AQIM was now attempting to spread through the West African country.Īnd Haidara's manuscripts were precious for what they said more broadly about Africa's history.
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