![]() Sane Chirfi, who represents the family which looks after the mausoleum of Alpha Moya in Timbuktu, in front of the mausoleum. Madrasas Built for Worship and Scholarship Malian rulers also built great mosques, not only for spiritual practice, but also as centers of learning of mathematics, law, grammar, history, geography, astronomy and astrology. Powerful West African kings and Islamic leaders traveled from far and wide to Timbuktu to trade, learn and foster strong political allies.īy the 16th century, Timbuktu hosted 150 to 180 Qur’anic schools, or Maktabs. Under Mansa Musa I and his successors, Timbuktu transformed from a small but successful trading post into a center of commerce and scholarship, making the Mali empire one of the most influential of the Golden Age of Islam. And when Islam came to Tuareg societies as early as the 8th century, the Tuaregs passed along the religion through trading posts like Timbuktu, facilitating connections between Arab-Islamic and West African peoples. Powerful West African kingdoms and the pastoralist Tuaregs of the Southern Sahara traded here. Timbuktu had been a seasonal trading post established in 1100 A.C., where the Saharan Desert and the Niger Delta meet, creating a lush and lucrative agricultural zone. In 2012, Timbuktu was once again placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of threats related to armed conflict.Mansa Musa I was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa from 1312 to 1337. Perched as it is on the edge of the Sahara, Timbuktu also faces the threat of encroaching desert sands. Timbuktu struggles to draw tourist revenue and develop tourism in a way that preserves the past-new construction near the mosques has prompted the World Heritage Committee to keep the site under close surveillance. But with major improvements to the preservation of the three ancient mosques Timbuktu earned its way off that list in 2005. Things in Timbuktu deteriorated to the point that, though recognized as a World Heritage site only a few years before, it was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 1990. French colonization at the close of the 19th century dealt another serious blow to the former glories of Timbuktu. The city’s importance and prestige waned and scholars drifted elsewhere. In the 16th century, Moroccan invaders began to drive scholars out, and trade routes slowly shifted to the coasts. It was these profitable caravans, in fact, that first brought scholars to congregate at the site. Salt from the desert had great value and, along with other caravan goods, enriched the city in its heyday. This characterization had roots in reality and in fact continues to the present in much reduced form. Timbuktu sits near the Niger River, where North Africa’s savannas disappear into the sands of the Sahara, and part of its romantic image is that of a camel caravan trade route. Religion wasn’t the city’s only industry. Some fledgling efforts toward this end are now underway. There is hope that libraries and cultural centers can be established to preserve the precious collection and become a source of tourist revenue. Most of Timbuktu’s priceless manuscripts are in private hands, where they’ve been hidden for many years, and some have vanished into the black market in a trade that threatens to take with it part of Timbuktu’s soul. These 14th- and 15th-century places of worship were also the homes of Islamic scholars known as the Ambassadors of Peace. But the city’s former status as an Islamic oasis is echoed in its three great mud-and-timber mosques: Djinguereber, Sankore, and Sidi Yahia, which recall Timbuktu's golden age. Now a shadow of its former glory, Timbuktu-in modern-day Mali-strikes most travelers as humble and perhaps a bit run-down. Many of them remain, though in precarious condition, forming a priceless written record of African history. The great teachings of Islam, from astronomy and mathematics to medicine and law, were collected and produced here in several hundred thousand manuscripts. Sacred Muslim texts, in bound editions, were carried great distances to Timbuktu for the use of eminent scholars from Cairo, Egypt Baghdad, Iraq and elsewhere who were in residence in the city. Timbuktu was a center of Islamic scholarship under several African empires, home to a 25,000-student university and other madrassas that served as wellsprings for the spread of Islam throughout Africa from the 13th to 16th centuries. This West African city-long synonymous with the uttermost end of Earth-was added to the World Heritage List in 1988, many centuries after its apex. ![]()
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