#AfricaMonth: The legend of Timbuktu is true
Contemporary to the Renaissance in Europe, during its Golden Age, Timbuktu was an unparalleled centre of Islamic learning and scholarship in Africa.
From here to Timbuktu…
A metaphor for mysterious, inaccessible places… A place you thought does not exist, but it does.
Timbuktu is a city in the West African country of Mali situated 20 kilometers north of the River Niger on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.
Largest university city in the world
Rapid economic growth in the 13th and 14th centuries due to trade in mainly salt, gold and ivory turned the legendary city into one of the greatest academic centres in the world. In the city’s Golden Age in the 15th and 16th centuries it became a magnet for scholars of religion, the arts, mathematics and the sciences.
A contemporary of Oxford and the Sorbonne, the level of learning at Timbuktu’s Sankoré University was superior to that of all other Islamic centres in the world. More than 25,000 students studied in Timbuktu, making it the largest university city in the world at the time.
The Sankoré mosque, also known as the University of Sankoré, was one of the earliest universities in the world.
700 000 manuscripts – priceless record of African history
Timbuktu housed one of the largest libraries of manuscripts since Egypt’s famous library in Alexandria, that was burnt down.
An active trade in books between Timbuktu and other parts of the Islamic world led to the writing of thousands of manuscripts. During the city’s Golden Age, books became the most valuable commodity above all other trade goods. Timbuktu housed more than 700,000 manuscripts, forming a priceless written record of African history.
About 20,000 manuscripts are preserved by the Ahmed Baba Institute, built in 2009 to protect the fragile literary artifacts.
Many of the books also reside in some of the local families’ private libraries. Among the families with manuscript collections, it’s traditional for one family member from each generation to swear publicly that he will protect the library for as long as he lives.
