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The brave librarians of Timbuktu

they saved 350,000 manuscripts from the Islamic extremists

Abdel Kader Haiara

Abdel Kader Haiara

Abdel Kader Haidara, the librarian from Mali whose story was told in essay The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts) by Joshua Hammer, is the man who in 1012 with his colleagues saved 350,000 ancient manuscripts from the forces of Al Qaeda.

In April that year, when he was back from a work trip, he found Timbuktu under the siege of a thousand Islamic extremists. Fearing the Islamists could destroy the manuscripts - which showed a tolerating vision of Islam dating back to the XV and XVI centuries, when the city was a blooming trade hub and hosted mor over 150 universities  – Haidara managed to funnel the money of a study grant (won from the Ford Foundation) into the work of transfer of the precious books. Together with relatives, archivists, librarians and tourist guides of the city he moved them from Timbuktu to the capital of Mali, Bamako, further east and out of the grip of Al Qaeda.

For eight months, every night, hundreds volunteers brought cases full of books loaded on the back of the donkeys from a safe haven to another.."Smuggling" the books this way  was difficult, mainly because of the checkpoints: those of the jihadists in the area near Timbuktu, those of Mali's army in the area under the government's control. Some manuscripts were also damaged during the raids of the soldiers and guerrilla-men in search for weapons.

Despite Haiara's efforts, in January 2013 the militia-men of Al Qaeda set afire the Ahmed Baba Institute of Timbuktu,which kept nearly 100,000 manuscripts. Soon t thereafter, the French army stepped in the North of Mali to stop the conflict: Islamists had destroyed 4,000 manuscripts, a small percentage if you consider that as a whole, the town kept nearly 400,000 in 2012.

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