"The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" by Joshua Hammer

The story of a massive smuggling operation to save mediaeval manuscripts from jihaidists.

There are two hooks. The first is that title. There seems to be a spate of books recently with the title The #name of a profession of #name of a place, such as The Bookseller of Kabul and The Beekeeper of Aleppo. Normally they leave me unmoved but when I saw this title, I knew I had to read the book. The second hook is the prologue which recounts the most dramatic incident recounted in the book, the sort of prologue that seems to be obligatory for this sort of book.

Duly hooked, I then moved into a five chapter section that recounts how Abdel Kader Haidara, our hero, became a librarian after inheriting his fathers collection of manuscripts. Timbuktu, where Haidara lived, had been one of the jewels of Islamic scholarship in the middle-ages and was home to about 400,000 manuscripts, some single pages, some books, which - because of trouble over the last few hundred years involving colonial rule and regular attempts by the local Tuaregs to gain independence - were mostly scattered in family collections and hidden in cellars and store rooms and caches in the desert. Haidara became recruited by the Ahmed Baba Institute to search out manuscripts and persuade their owners to lend, donate or sell them to a central library where they could be properly preserved (the dry desert conditions meant the manuscripts were unlikely to rot but termites were a huge problem) and archived. He also set up his own family library.

The second section of the book (another four chapters) considers the provenance of the fundamentalist jihadi Islamists who were to capture Timbuktu in April 2012. Here we are introduced to several of the main jihadi leaders.

Then we come to the meat of the book. Haidara realised that Islamists are likely to destroy many of the manuscripts because, besides Islamic teachings, many of them refer to secular matters, including history, medicine, astrology, magic and love poetry. So he started to smuggle them out of the now 45 libraries and back into hiding places with trusted residents. Then he realised that even this is insufficiently secure and organised a covert operation to move them by river to the Malian held city in the south.

Finally we learn of the defeat of the Islamists and the return of music and tourism. 

It's presented as a stirring adventure story, goodies versus baddies, with no attempt to consider alternative viewpoints. As such, it exceeds expectations. It is exciting. There is ever-present danger. There are moments when you wonder why any back-packing tourist would dream of exploring the frequently-god-forsaken corner of the earth, braving not just discomfort and disease but the threat of kidnap and murder. For those of us who like sitting comfortably at home, it's armchair excitement.

It also made me ask whether any work of art or cultural artefact is worth the price of a human life. But I suppose these things endure, testifying to the human spirit long after we temporary humans have turned to windblown dust.

Selected quotes: 

• “A Sudanese proverb from the time declared that ‘Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo’” (Ch 2)
• “Timbuktu grew from a collection of tents and mud-and-wattle houses along the riverbank into a crossroads of the world and a collision point of two cultures - bringing together desert and river traffic in continuous and mutually enriching exchanges.” (Ch 2)
• “In 1995, the town had no newspapers, one radio station, and two phone lines.” (Ch 5)
• “We were sitting on carpets ... The salon was decorated with Tuareg swords and dusty family photographs, and a gas-operated ‘cooling machine’ stirred up the stultifying air, rattling as we talked.” (Ch 11)
• “The knife-edge summit of the giant dune, its surface intricately scalloped by the constant wind.” (Ch 11)
• “The forty-five libraries served as repositories for a total of 377,000 manuscripts.” (Ch 12)
• “The worship of saints and the construction of shrines had spread through much of the Islamic world following the death of the Prophet Muhammad ... It was not until the eighteenth century, when Muhammad Abd al Wahhab ... began his campaign of religious purification, that such rights and practices began to be seen as heretical.” (Ch 13)
• “The streets outside the noisy and squalid, a jumble of shabby concrete-block buildings and exhaust-spewing motorbikes.” (Ch 14)
• “Haidara kept a cell phone on each ear ... receiving reports from his couriers every few minutes: the sweat acted as an adhesive, gluing the device's to his ears.” (Ch 16)

May 2025; 242 pages

First published by Simon & Schuster in New York, USA in 2016

My Simon & Schuster paperback edition was issued in 2016

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God