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#Timbuktu

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petersuber

Saving science and scholarship from marauders

I just finished Joshua Hammer's _Bad-Ass Librarians_. It recounts the complex and dangerous effort to gather hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts from private homes around #Timbuktu, where they were under assault from rot and termites, to collect and repair them in the Ahmed Baba Institute (in Timbuktu, funded by Kuwait), to evacuate them surreptitiously to prevent their destruction by #AlQuaeda in their 2012-2013 invasion of northern #Mali, and finally to ensure their safe return to Institute. Plus, great title.

Recommended, partly for the history (new to me) of the medieval golden age of #Muslim science and scholarship in northwest #Africa, centered in Timbuktu, and partly for the example of a small band of Malian librarians to save their cultural heritage.

Of course there are also ominous similarities to current news.

#Librarians#Libraries
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earthling

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu
The Quest for the Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures

Two tales of a city: The historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.

@bookstodon
#Timbuktu
#manuscripts
#libraries

To Westerners, the name "Timbuktu" long conjured a tantalising paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for "discovery" tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city. But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval centre of learning, it was home to tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When al-Qaeda–linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents...
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Miss Jones

Dieses Buch hat in meinem Kopf einen nachhaltigen Eindruck hinterlassen.

Es geht darum, wie die Einwohner Timbuktus ihren einzigartigen kulturellen Schatz vor dem IS gerettet haben. Die ältesten Bibliotheken Afrikas haben sie heimlich aus der Stadt geschmuggelt. Es ist sooooo Lesenswert: (Buchtipp: miss-jones.de/2018/08/24/die-b)
Und ich bin so traurig, dass sich diese Region einfach nicht beruhigt. Denn ich Träume davon, #Timbuktu eines Tages selbst zu sehen.

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