Retreating Rebels In Mali May Have Destroyed Ancient Texts

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And as we've been reporting this morning, the Islamist forces in Mali, linked to al Qaida, have just been driven out of the desert city of Timbuktu by French and Malian forces.


For months, the fundamentalists have systematically destroyed ancient religious sites, targeting, especially, the tombs mystic Sufi saints, and they continued their destruction, even as they were leaving the city.

MONTAGNE: Word from Timbuktu is that as they retreated, they torched a library holding tens of thousands of historic documents, written as far back as the 13th century.

Though it's not yet known how many of the ancient texts have been lost, that library, the Ahmed Baba Institute, was built by the South African government as part of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, a preservation program led by Shamil Jeppie. He teaches at the University of Cape Town where we reached him.

Welcome to the program.

SHAMIL JEPPIE: Thank you so much.

MONTAGNE: These documents, what exactly are they? They're not all religious, right?

JEPPIE: No. No. Well, I mean, the most beautifully illustrated and illuminated are the old Qurans and many of them are liturgical Sufi documents text. You know, prayers and grammar, and text that would've been used in the educational system in the informal classes held at the feet of teachers and so on.


MONTAGNE: I have read that some of these documents also contain poetry. And I mean they're cultural treasures and every respect. But they would not have had figures in them or be representing humans, which is a thing we've all come to think that very fundamentalist Islamist don't like. So why are they destroying what is their own precious cultural heritage?


MONTAGNE: How have these fragile, you know, documents - how have they managed to survive so far; some of them, centuries?

JEPPIE: This is not the first time that you have a crisis in Timbuktu. There was an insurgency in the '90s and then in the early '60s, and then, of course, throughout much of the 18th and 19th century there was (unintelligible) much chaos and the region.

I'm particularly interested in this Northwest African tradition of archiving and constituting collections; how is it that families came to keep libraries in treasuries, items. What are the intellectual and mental processes and so on? And we have been told stories of them burying manuscript collections for decades, in fact, until they felt safe and secure enough to take them out.

And this is what happened in the late '60s and '70s when the Ahmed Baba library first was established. And then there was a project to collect them from families, and families would trade a couple of items for a goat or a camel or a cow. And so, there was a bartering process, a moment where it all went to the state project.

And then some of the families said, now let us do our own thing and they came to constitute their own collections and their own libraries. And these libraries are not centralized, so they are in families' homes and so on. And the collections are spread out over the town and the region.

MONTAGNE: It must be so sad to think about this.

JEPPIE: That's why I don't want to entertain the thought that there is destruction and fire, and what have you. Maybe I'm just - I just don't want to entertain the thought of this destruction.

MONTAGNE: Shamil Jippie is senior researcher at the University of Cape Town's Institutes for Humanities in Africa. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.

JEPPIE: Thank you, indeed.



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