Timbuktu may be a city that has long gripped the Western imagination. It sits on the Niger , that clearly marked line between the sandy deserts of North Africa and therefore the green, moist, fertile lands of tropical and sub-tropical Africa, the long-lasting jungles we accompany Congo and a blazing equatorial sun.
Timbuktu is additionally rooted deeply within the English . Even young children speak of Timbuktu within the sense of "as distant from where i'm now because it is feasible to urge ." and a few of its charm, too, derives simply from the euphony of the word: "Timbuktu" slips off the tongue. We also speak definitively of "Sub-Saharan Africa" as if that were itself a reputation . Is that not an odd thing to do? Would we ever call the us and Mexico "Sub-Canadian America"?
Timbuktu has an importance belied by its geographic isolation because it's served now for millennia because the doorway between the deserts and therefore the jungles of Africa. it's the passage that one had to steer through, when camels and canoes were the principal vehicles of African travel, to urge from North Africa to Sub-Saharan Africa -- and back again. It maintained that role well into the 20th century, and it maintains it still today, a minimum of symbolically.
Because of its critical position because the gateway to the south, Arab traders and evangelists from the seventh and eighth centuries onward made Timbuktu how station of very special significance. Its two principal mosques are magnificent works of architecture, and Timbuktu's Islamic libraries are compared in stature to those of Baghdad and Cairo.
Though it's been no stranger to conflict over the centuries, Timbuktu today is in acute, grave danger, a kind of danger it's not faced before. Timbuktu may very well risk being destroyed because Islamic militias are battling over the encompassing territory and therefore the very city itself.
These militias, with fanatical zeal, have already damaged ancient tombs which commemorate the ultimate resting place of Sufi saints, now deemed to be "idolatrous" by Ansar Dine, an extremist group. A dozen sacred tombs have already been vandalized.
Worse, Timbuktu's ancient libraries, housing priceless collections of ancient Islamic texts that the UNESCO World Heritage Center estimates may number 300,000, (including books on early Islamic studies of mathematics and science -- the treasure trove isn't limited to spiritual tracts), are now in danger of being burned or destroyed.
These priceless texts can't be replaced. a number of them exist solely as one-time, unique calligraphy on scrolls. Destroy the only copy in Timbuktu and there are not any sister copies in Cairo or Baghdad to preserve its intellectual content. Though some manuscripts are moved to safer repositories, too many remain in Timbuktu, where imams have preserved them for hundreds of years . But the imams haven't faced the threat they face today.
And yet these books and scrolls might be saved both really and as digital copies -- if there was a will and how expressed by the greater international community that made this attention of worldwide concern. a part of the matter is that the calamity facing Timbuktu isn't widely known in Europe and America.
And now comes an excellent young American photographer and writer, Alexandra Huddleston, who has given a considerable portion of the last eight years of her life documenting, in magnificent images and moving words, the dire threat that faces Timbuktu, both its living people and its living treasures. She has put all her work into a book, a volume which will hold you prisoner.
Her 96-page text is titled "333 Saints: a lifetime of Scholarship in Timbuktu" and it tells the story of a city under siege -- there's no less blunt thanks to put it -- by Islamic fanatics who think nothing of killing people and fewer of killing texts. Supported partially by her Fulbright, Alexandra Huddleston tells in photographs and words the story of Timbuktu's long lineage of Islamic scholarship, and of how that scholarship is now imperilled as never before.
In a short piece she wrote for the event group Kickstarter, Huddleston says that her book "tells a story of discovery, an upscale and delightful African intellectual culture that is still largely unknown within the West. it's a book about men and ladies who love books -- scholars of all ages who seek knowledge and wisdom through learning. it's a few city that has built its identity around a culture of scholarship."
Alexandra Huddleston may be a native of Africa, the daughter of Foreign Service parents then stationed in Sierra Leone . Though she hung out growing up in Washington, D.C., she has traveled extensively everywhere the planet and she or he fell crazy with Mali, that mysterious home to numerous elegant peoples that's so deeply hidden within the southern Sahara, a nation that lightly touches, too, in its southern precincts, Africa's moist, green lushness.
Alexandra was introduced to Mali by her mother Vicki Huddleston, who had two tours of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Mali, first as a staffer within the political and economic section early in her career and later as ambassador. Vicki Huddleston began her overseas journeys as a young Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, so Alexandra's affection for remote and difficult places appears to be deep in her DNA.
Alexandra Huddleston's work "333 Saints: a lifetime of Scholarship in Timbuktu" must be approached by American and European readers with a way of urgency, for there's a true risk of cultural extinction here, the permanent loss of treasures that help inform us of who we are. There are scientific treasures here, too, dating from that period when Islamic science eclipsed the backward European scholarship of the center Ages.
Many during this country were aghast when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan a dozen years ago, using precisely an equivalent "logic" (that they're idolatrous) now being directed against Timbuktu's Sufi saints and Islamic libraries.
But what's happening in Timbuktu is arguably much worse, because manuscripts encode vastly more human thought, history, emotion, and knowledge than stone statues are capable of doing. Where is that the sense of shock that's now needed?
Anyone who loves Africa will cherish this book. And by focussing attention on the dire predicament in Timbuktu, perhaps an answer are often found which will preserve this human heritage for those that come later, who may treat these treasures more wisely.
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