The Bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu and their race to save the worlds most precious manuscripts.

By
Joshua Hammer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Pp. 278. ISBN 978-1-4767-7740-5.
Michele Lockleair
UNC-Greensboro
10 July 2016
In a world connected by technology everywhere we look it is hard to fathom how little we in the
United States really know about the world we live in. The freedom we enjoy and take for granted in this
nation is not the norm for everyone. It is so easy for us to hide behind our electronic devices and ignore
the plight of others across oceans and many thousands of miles. In his book, The Bad-Ass Librarians of
Timbuktu and their race to save the worlds most precious manuscript, Joshua Hammer gives an account
of one place in this world that has been in flux for millennia and few people ever think about.
This account is about the history and current state of Timbuktu and especially about the
illuminated manuscripts that have been saved. Timbuktu is in the western Africa on the southern edge
of the Sahara Desert and near the Niger River.
Most people consider most parts of Africa as third world countries, at least I always have. As a
child I remember the jokes of being shipped to Timbuktu if you didnt behave. I always thought it was a
make believe place that just meant somewhere far away, but Timbuktu is a real city. The fact is that
Timbuktu was a major hub of civilization, science, and academics as well as a multicultural civilization.
Scholars studied and wrote about math, science, astrology, jurisprudence, Arabic, and the Koran. Some
of the oldest illuminated manuscripts and forward thinking came from this region.
The book begins with a scene from an action movie. Someone is smuggling these manuscripts
through checkpoints with armed guards and thinking back to a time when they were not so lucky to
make it through and spent days being interrogated. This time, though, things go smoothly. We are then
shuttled back and forth between recent events in the life of Abdel Kader Haidara, one of the so-called
Bad-Ass Librarians, the past history of Timbuktu, and the present occupation of Timbuktu by the
terrorist organization Al Qaeda.

The history of Timbuktu and Mali is somewhat tumultuous. At one time it was taken over by
France and citizens were routinely subjected to raids by the French Colonial Army and many heirlooms
and precious artifacts were stolen and destroyed. It was during this time that people started to hide
their manuscripts away to keep them safe. Manuscripts were placed in cloth sacks and buried in the
desert or placed in holes in the walls of caves. During the French reign Arabic became obsolete and the
hidden manuscripts became irrelevant.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) helped to fund
the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research in Timbuktu and Abdel Kader
Haidaras father Mamma Haidara was one of the people that worked to try to find the hidden
manuscripts and hoped to bring Timbuktu back to glory again. He did much for the cause and when he
died in 1981 left the family library of approximately 45,000 volumes to his son for safe-keeping.
Mahmoud Zouber, head of the Ahmed Baba Institute, one of the most accomplished scholars in
northern Africa, and his fathers friend and employer asked Abdel Kader Haidara to work for him and
help continue what his father had started. It was not an easy task due to people being skeptical of
anything that had to do with government since the time of the French occupation. Haidara learned all
that he could as he studied about manuscript history and conservation and he spent years going door to
door from one remote village to another on donkey or camel back to try to recover the history and
manuscripts of Timbuktu. Over a nine-year period Haidara acquired 16,500 manuscripts, one of the
largest public collections of Arabic handwritten books in the world (p. 48). Eventually there were over
40 libraries in Timbuktu thanks to the work of Haidara housing approximately 400,000 original
manuscripts.
As the political landscape changed, so did the story. The 1990s became a time of upheaval and
a time when extremist Islamic groups began to rise up. Timbuktu was once again taken over. This time
by jihadists set to get rid of everything and anything that was not in line with their extreme views of

Islam and the Koran. Haidara and many others became concerned that the jihadists would soon destroy
the manuscripts they had worked so hard to save. As the terror grew and people lost their hands or feet
for smoking or not wearing the proper attire as prescribed in the Koran, Haidara knew it was time to
safeguard the manuscripts to save the history of Timbuktu. Plans were made to hide the manuscripts all
over the city and eventually to get them to safe houses in Bamako, the capital of Mali, about 1,000
kilometers southeast of Timbuktu. The story comes to an end just after the French come to the aid of
Mali and push out and capture most of the jihadists and Al Qaeda that were trying to take over Mali. At
the end of the story the books are safe, but not yet back in their rightful home in Timbuktu.
This book details the history of Timbuktu and recounts a period of great scholarly achievement
in a place where most people have no idea that such works existed or came out of. This is also a story of
a people that are hell-bent on saving their past for the future and people that would risk their life to do
so. The books that have been saved are from some of the greatest savants and scientists, preserved for
centuries, hidden from the nineteenth-century jihadis and the French conquerors, survivors of floods
and pernicious effects of dust, bacteria, water, and insects (p.210). This is a story of hope that out of
such horror good things and good people do exist.