LONDON — Scholars are urgently trying to determine the fate of a treasure store of ancient manuscripts in the city of Timbuktu.
As French-led forces consolidated their hold on northern Mali, international scholars feared the worst: that retreating Islamic militants had torched the Ahmed Baba Institute, home to 30,000 priceless items of scholarship dating back to the 13th century.
But many volumes may have escaped destruction by being hidden from fundamentalist forces that seized the north last year. The militants launched a campaign to eradicate historic vestiges of a medieval Muslim civilization that they deemed un-Islamic.
South African researchers involved in a project to preserve the Timbuktu manuscripts have had word that most of the treasures survived in private libraries and secure locations.
Mohamed Mathee of the University of Johannesburg told eNews Channel Africa, “It seems most of the manuscripts are OK. These manuscripts are with families and are safe.”
National Geographic News quoted Sidi Ahmed, a reporter who fled Timbuktu during its occupation, as saying: “The people here have long memories. They are used to hiding their manuscripts. They go into the desert and bury them until it is safe.”
Whatever the fate of the city’s ancient texts, the French intervention came too late to save some of the city’s most valued monuments, including centuries-old shrines of Sufi saints demolished by the Islamists during their nine-month rule.
It was part of a culture war that they waged to impose Sharia law after their capture of the north. The strict Sunni Salafists reject the worship of saints that is part of the Shia and Sufi tradition.
When UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, placed Timbuktu on its list of endangered world heritage sites after the Islamist takeover, Oumar Ould Hamaha, a spokesman for the Ansar Dine militants, responded: “We are subject to religion and not to international opinion.”
Elsewhere in North Africa, militants have attacked Sufi shrines as well as remnants of the region’s pre-Islamic past.
Radical Islamists were blamed last October for the destruction of stone carvings in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains that were more than 8,000 years old and depicted the sun as a pagan divinity.
Their destruction was reminiscent to that of the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan, which were dynamited out of existence in 2001 by the Afghan Taliban despite appeals from fellow Muslims.
Such seemingly wanton acts of religiously inspired vandalism are not, of course, confined to Islamic fundamentalists, as my colleague Barbara Crossette wrote at the time.
“Certainly it evoked the religious triumphalism that plagues a broad swath of the world, from China to the Balkans,” she wrote, “the destruction of centuries-old mosques by Hindus at Ayodhya or by Serbs in Bosnia, or the assaults on heritage that defy peace itself in Jerusalem.”
From the Crusades to the conquest of the Americas, a militant Catholic Church also displayed a predilection for eradicating the artifacts of pagans and religious rivals alike. In the 17th century English Civil War, iconoclastic Puritans hacked down the statues of churches and cathedrals.
Recent events in Mali have highlighted how today’s ideological wars are fought with more than just weapons.
The Timbuktu manuscripts, which include texts on religion, medicine and mathematics, had been treasured by local families but largely neglected by the outside world until the end of French colonial rule in 1960.
That changed dramatically in recent years as rival African powers sought to use culture in their campaigns for influence in the region.
As my colleague Lydia Polgreen wrote from Timbuktu in 2007, both South Africa and the Libya of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi were involved in efforts to revive the fortunes of the ancient city and its artifacts.
The South African initiative involved building a new library for the Ahmed Baba Institute, while Libya planned to build a luxurious 100-room resort to hold academic and religious conferences.
Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East also poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into transforming the city’s family libraries.
“Timbuktu’s new seekers have a variety of motives,” she wrote. “South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa.”
