Timbuktu: mosques, scholars and manuscripts (14th-16th centuries)

Part oneA town at the meeting point

Timbuktu stands just north of the Niger, where the river bends closest to the desert. Tuareg herders camped there from around 1100, and it grew into a meeting place. Camels came in from the Sahara with salt, and boats came up the river with gold, grain and kola nuts. Whoever held Timbuktu held the link between the desert and the river.

Mali took the town under Mansa Ule, and Mansa Musa made it a city. The Djinguereber Mosque, designed for him by al-Sahili, rose in mud brick and timber, and it is still used for prayer. Mansa Sulayman, Musa's brother, who ruled from about 1341 to 1360, kept on supporting the town's scholars. In 1352 the traveller Ibn Battuta came to Mali and stayed for months. He praised the safety of the roads, saying a traveller had nothing to fear from thieves, and the care people took over the prayers, especially on Friday, and the way they made their children learn the Quran by heart.

Part twoTeachers, students and books

Timbuktu had no single university building. Learning took place in its mosques, above all the Sankore and the Djinguereber, and in the homes of its scholars, where students gathered around a teacher. A student moved from teacher to teacher and book to book, and received a licence to teach each text once he had mastered it. The subjects were the Quran and its sciences, hadith, Maliki law, Arabic grammar and rhetoric, along with mathematics, astronomy and medicine.

Books were the city's pride. Pilgrims and merchants brought manuscripts back from Cairo, Fes and Makkah, and scribes in Timbuktu copied them. Families of scholars kept libraries over generations. Later accounts claim that the libraries of Sankore held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Whatever the true number, tens of thousands of manuscripts from the region survive today, on law, theology, astronomy, medicine and history, many with notes in their margins by their readers.

The best-known scholar of the city was Ahmad Baba, born in 1556 to a family of jurists. He wrote dozens of works, many on Maliki law, and his own library is said to have held some 1,600 volumes, which he called one of the smaller collections among his family.

Part threeA wider world of learning

Timbuktu was one of several such towns. Upriver, Djenné was a market and a centre of learning too, famous for its great mud-brick mosque. Far to the west, in what is now Mauritania, the town of Chinguetti had been founded in the eighth century as a stop for Hajj caravans. Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries it had about thirty family libraries, and the whole region came to be known as Bilad Shinqit after it. Scholars there were often traders, which made them good at buying and copying books, and in the late twentieth century about 30,000 manuscripts still survived in nearly 300 libraries of the region.

These towns tied the Sahel to the wider Muslim world. Students from the Niger studied in Fes and Cairo, and teachers from North Africa settled on the Niger. Books written in Baghdad and Cairo were read and argued over at the edge of the Sahara.

From the hadith

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:

He who alleviates the suffering of a brother out of the sufferings of the world, Allah would alleviate his suffering from the sufferings of the Day of Resurrection, and he who finds relief for one who is hard-pressed, Allah would make things easy for him in the Hereafter, and he who conceals (the faults) of a Muslim, Allah would conceal his faults in the world and in the Hereafter. Allah is at the back of a servant so long as the servant is at the back of his brother, and he who treads the path in search of knowledge, Allah would make that path easy, leading to Paradise for him and those persons who assemble in the house among the houses of Allah (mosques) and recite the Book of Allah and they learn and teach the Qur'an (among themselves) there would descend upon them tranquility and mercy would cover them and the angels would surround them and Allah mentions them in the presence of those near Him, and he who is slow-paced in doing good deeds, his (high) lineage does not make him go ahead.

At the edge of the Sahara, families kept libraries for generations and called them their wealth.

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The mapWhere it happened

• Timbuktu
• Djenné
• Gao
• Walata
• Chinguetti
• the Niger

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