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In Mali, West Africa, along the southern edge of the Sahara, lies a somnolent stopover for tourists: Timbuktu. Today, in this city once fabled to be as rich as it was remote, there is nothing much to do except leave. But throughout the middle ages, Timbuktu was to rival Al-Azhar in Cairo as the hub of Islamic scholarship and enterprise. Originally a small 12th century Tuareg settlement, Timbuktu was added to the prosperous sultanate of Mansa Musa in 1325. In the surrounding dunes, salt was mined and traded for gold, and for centuries to come European explorers were lured to the metropolis by reports of buildings covered with gold plates and rivers glistening with precious metals. For its inhabitants, merchants, scholars, and those who sought fortune within its ochre walls, the wealth of Timbuktu was more than mineral. Mansa Musa commissioned the building of three main mosques: Sankore, Djinguereber and Sidi Yahia. Each was a formidable structure around which centres of learning and commerce flourished. Sankore Mosque, with its unique pyramidal mihrab, was the focal point of Sankore University. The university’s reputation peaked in the 16th century and at one point it boasted a student body exceeding 25,000 – more than the entire population of Timbuktu today. Students came from as far afield as Mecca to study for ten years at one of the university’s many colleges under the auspices of a single imam. Upon graduating in Qur’an studies, logic, literature, jurisprudence, mathematics, Islamic science, medicine and astronomy, a student would be presented with a prestigious turban – a mark of distinguished scholarship. Often, visiting merchants from Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of Africa who came for financial gain, were invited by the people of Timbuktu to profit from the learning to be had at Sankore. They believed that anyone who had negotiated the hazardous journey to their midst was a worthy recipient of the knowledge to be had – and indeed of their faith, many outsiders accepted the invitation and converted to Islam. The majority of the city’s business leaders, its administrators and town planners were former Sankore alumni, the less privileged craftsmen of Timbuktu were subsidised to study and set up guilds. In 1591 Morocco captured Timbuktu and within two years Sankore’s most respected scholars had been killed, arrested or exiled to Morrocco, and its impressive libraries fell into neglect. It was little wonder that by the time the French occupied Timbuktu in 1894, all that remained of Sankore was a mosque in disrepair and a dwindling tradition of erudition. |
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