"Way out in Timbuktu"

I'm sure many of us have heard someone use this expression.

Timbuktu, which included Djenne and Sankore; these are all names that our children should know.

Perhaps, when the HipHop artist Nasir Jones said, "History don't acknowledge us; we were scholars, long before colleges," he was doing more than simply making a nice-sounding rhyme.





According to the Guiness book of World Records, the oldest Degree-Granting University, in the Modern sense of the term, was founded in Fez, Morocco.

The woman who founded it was Fatima al-Fahiri, this sister was born in Tunisia, Africa in an unknown year, but in 859, she founded the oldest academic degree-granting university existing today, the University of Qarawiyyin, with money inherited from her father, a wealthy businessman. She is said to have fasted during the building of the university.

Then, we have what is often mistakenly called the oldest Modern university and that is El Azhar University, built during the Fatimid Dynasty of Egypt, in 975 AD, and of course Timbuktu is dated to the 1000's.

Please look up Timbuktu's preservation foundation. They do travelling tours and exhibits, as well as preserving the thousands of documents, which were written on everything from accounting to religion to algebra to poetry of love.

Tuareg and other travelers would entrust this woman with any belongings for which they had no use on their return trip to the north. Thus, when a Tuareg, upon returning to his home, was asked where he had left his belongings, he would answer: "I left them at Tin Buktu", meaning the place where Buktu lived.

The two terms ended up fusing into one word, thus giving the city the name of Tinbuktu which later became Timbuktu.

Timbuktu (Timbuctoo; Koyra Chiini: Tumbutu; French: Tombouctou) is a city in Tombouctou Region, in the West African nation of Mali.

It was made most prosperous by Mansa Musa, tenth mansa (emperor) of the Mali Empire. It is home to the prestigious Sankore University and other madrasas, and was an intellectual and spiritual capital well into the 15th and 16th centuries.

Timbuktu's long-lasting contribution to Islamic and world civilization is scholarship. Timbuktu is assumed to have had one of the first universities in the world. Local scholars and collectors still boast an impressive collection of ancient Greek texts from that era.

By the 14th century, important books were written and copied in Timbuktu, establishing the city as the centre of a significant written tradition in Africa.

Tales of Timbuktu's fabulous wealth helped prompt European exploration of the west coast of Africa. Among the earliest descriptions of Timbuktu are those of Leo Africanus, Ibn Battuta and Shabeni.


Leo Africanus
Perhaps most famous among the tales written about Timbuktu is that by Leo Africanus. As a captured renegade who later converted to Islam from Christianity, following a trip in 1512, when the Songhai empire was at its height he wrote the following:

The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and sceptres of gold, some whereof weigh 1300 pounds. ... He hath always 3000 horsemen ... (and) a great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king's expense.

At the time of Leo Africanus' visit, grass was abundant, providing plentiful milk and butter in the local cuisine, though there were neither gardens nor orchards surrounding the city.

"El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyati was born in the Moorish city of Granada in 1485, but was expelled along with his parents and thousands of other Muslims by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Settling in Morocco, he studied in Fez, and as a teenager accompanied his uncle on diplomatic missions throughout North Africa and and to the Sub-Saharan kingdom of Ghana. Still a young man, he was captured by Christian pirates and presented as an exceptionally learned slave to the great Renaissance pope, Leo X. Leo freed him, baptised him under the name "Johannis Leo de Medici," and commissioned him to write in Italian the detailed survey of Africa which provided most of what Europeans knew about the continent for the next several centuries. At the time he visited the Ghanaian city of Timbuktu, it was somewhat past its peak, but still a thriving Islamic city famous for its learning. "Timbuktu" was to become a byword in Europe as the most inaccessible of cities, but at the time Leo visited, it was the center of a busy trade in African products and in books. Leo is said to have died in 1554 in Tunis, having reconverted to Islam."



Shabeni was a merchant from Tetuan who was captured and ended up in England where he told his story of how as a child of 14, around 1787, he had gone with his father to Timbuktu. A version of his story is related by James Grey Jackson in his book An Account of Timbuctoo and Hausa, 1820:

"On the east side of the city of Timbuctoo, there is a large forest, in which are a great many elephants. The timber here is very large. The trees on the outside of the forest are remarkable...they are of such a size that the largest cannot be girded by two men. They bear a kind of berry about the size of a walnut, in clusters consisting of from ten to twenty berries. Shabeeny cannot say what is the extent of this forest, but it is very large."

While Islam was practiced in the cities, the local rural majority were non-Muslim traditionalists. Often the leaders were nominal Muslims in the interest of economic advancement while the masses were traditionalists.

Sankore, as it stands now, was built in 1581 AD on a much older site and became the center of the scholarly community in Timbuktu. The "University of Sankore" was a madrassah, very different in organization from the universities of medieval Europe. It was composed of several entirely independent schools or colleges, each run by a single master.

Students associated themselves with a single teacher (the ancient Master-Student system), and courses took place in the open courtyards of mosque complexes or private residences. The primary focus of these schools was the teaching of the Qur'an, although broader instruction in fields such as logic, astronomy, and history also took place.

Scholars wrote their own books as part of a socioeconomic model based on scholarship.

The profit made by buying and selling of books was only second to the gold-salt trade.

Among the most formidable scholars, professors and lecturers was Ahmed Baba – a highly distinguished historian frequently quoted in the Tarikh-al-Sudan and other works.

The most outstanding treasure at Timbuktu are the 100,000 manuscripts kept by the great families from the town.

These manuscripts, some of them dated from pre-Islamic times and 12th century, have been preserved as family secrets in the town and in other villages nearby. The most were written in Arabic or Fulani, by wise men coming from the Mali Empire.

Their contents are didactic, especially in the subjects of astronomy, music, and botany. More recent manuscripts deal with law, sciences and history (with unique records such as the Tarikh al-Fetash by Mahmoud Kati from the 16th century or the Tarikh al-Sudan by Abderrahman al-Sadi on Sudanic history in the 17th century), religion, trading, etc.

The Ahmed Baba Institute (Cedrab), founded in 1970 by the government of Mali, with collaboration of Unesco, holds some of these manuscripts in order to restore and digitize them. More than 18,000 manuscripts have been collected by the Ahmed Baba centre, but there are an estimated 300,000-700,000 manuscripts in the region.

The collection of ancient manuscripts at the University of Sankore and other sites around Timbuktu document the magnificence of the institution, as well as the city itself, while enabling scholars to reconstruct the past in fairly intimate detail.

Dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries, these manuscripts cover every aspect of human endeavor and are indicative of the high level of civilization attained by West Africans at the time.

In testament to the glory of Timbuktu, for example, a West African Islamic proverb states that "Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom come from Timbuktu."

From 60 to 80 private libraries in the town have been preserving these manuscripts: Mamma Haidara Library; Fondo Kati Library (with approximately 3,000 records from Andalusian origin, the oldest dated from 14th and 15th centuries); Al-Wangari Library; and Mohamed Tahar Library, among them. These libraries are considered part of the "African Ink Road" that stretched from West Africa connecting North Africa and East Africa.

At one time there were 120 libraries with manuscripts in Timbuktu and surrounding areas.

There are more than one million objects preserved in Mali with an additional 20 million in other parts of Africa, the largest concentration of which is in Sokoto, Nigeria, although the full extent of the manuscripts is unknown.

During the colonial era efforts were made to conceal the documents after a number of entire libraries were taken to Paris, London and other parts of Europe.

Some manuscripts were buried underground, while others were hidden in the desert or in caves. Many are still hidden today. The United States Library of Congress microfilmed a sampling of the manuscripts during an exhibition there in June 2003. In February 2006 a joint South African/Malian effort began investigating the Timbuktu manuscripts to assess the level of scientific knowledge in Timbuktu and in the other regions of West Africa.