Islamic Heritage of Timbuktu and Mali

Where the desert meets the river

Timbuktu began, around the eleventh or twelfth century, as a seasonal camp and watering place used by Saharan nomads near the northernmost reach of the Niger. Its position was its fortune: here goods carried by camel across the desert could be transferred to boats on the river, and vice versa, making the town a natural meeting point between North and West Africa.

Over the following centuries it was drawn into the great empires of the western Sudan, first the Mali Empire and later the Songhai, under whose rule, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it reached its height. At its peak Timbuktu was a substantial city, cosmopolitan and wealthy, its markets and mosques known far beyond the Sahara.

Gold, salt and the trans-Saharan trade

The wealth of Timbuktu flowed from the caravan trade that crossed the Sahara. Southbound came slabs of rock salt, cut from desert mines such as Taghaza and prized in the tropics where salt was scarce; northbound went the gold of the West African goldfields, along with other goods, carried by camel caravans to the cities of the Maghreb and beyond.

The most famous embodiment of that wealth was Mansa Musa, ruler of Mali in the early fourteenth century, whose pilgrimage to Mecca around 1324, and the gold he distributed along the way, became legendary across the medieval world. On his return he encouraged building and scholarship, and tradition credits his era with the raising of Timbuktu's first great mosque. Trade brought not only riches but books and scholars, and it was this traffic in learning that would give the city its lasting fame.

The great earthen mosques

Timbuktu's most striking monuments are its three historic mosques, Djinguereber, Sankore and Sidi Yahya, built in the distinctive Sudano-Sahelian style from sun-dried mud brick and earth. Their sculpted, organic walls, studded with the projecting wooden beams known as toron, seem to grow from the ground, and their forms have shaped the architecture of the whole region.

The oldest, the Djinguereber Mosque, dates to the early fourteenth century and is traditionally associated with a scholar-architect who travelled south with Mansa Musa. Because earthen buildings are vulnerable to the rains, the mosques must be replastered regularly, a communal task that has bound the city to its monuments for generations. Together the three mosques form the core of Timbuktu's listing as a World Heritage site.

• The fourteenth-century Djinguereber Mosque
• The Sankore and Sidi Yahya mosques
• Sudano-Sahelian mud-brick architecture with projecting toron beams

A city of scholars

Timbuktu's true renown rested not on its trade but on its learning. Clustered around the Sankore Mosque was a loose community of teachers, students and Quranic schools, often described together as the University of Sankore, where subjects ranging from religion and law to grammar, astronomy and mathematics were studied and taught. Scholars came from across the Sahara to learn and to debate, and the city's most celebrated names, among them the jurist Ahmad Baba, who lived across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were known far beyond Mali.

This scholarly culture made books precious. They were bought, copied, inherited and treasured, and a substantial trade in manuscripts grew up alongside the trade in gold and salt. A private library became a mark of standing, and the accumulation of learning over centuries left Timbuktu with an extraordinary written inheritance.

• The scholarly network around the Sankore Mosque
• Studies from religion and law to astronomy and grammar
• Scholars such as Ahmad Baba, known across the Sahara

The manuscript libraries

The manuscripts of Timbuktu are among the great cultural treasures of Africa. Tens of thousands, and by some counts far more, survive in the city and the surrounding region, held in institutional collections such as the Ahmad Baba centre and in libraries kept by families for generations. They cover the whole span of Islamic learning, from copies of the Qur'an and works of law and theology to treatises on medicine, mathematics, astronomy and poetry, many finely written and illuminated.

Their survival has not been assured. When armed groups occupied northern Mali in 2012, many thousands of manuscripts were quietly evacuated to the capital, Bamako, by residents determined to save them, and though some were lost, the great majority were preserved. The rescue drew the world's attention to a heritage that scholars had long known, and efforts to conserve, catalogue and digitise the collections continue today.

Djenne and visiting today

Timbuktu's story belongs to a wider landscape. Upriver stands Djenne, another ancient trading and scholarly town, famous for its Great Mosque, the largest mud-brick building in the world, whose annual replastering is a festival for the whole community. Djenne and Timbuktu were long linked by the river, and together they represent the earthen architecture and Islamic learning of the medieval western Sudan.

It should be said plainly that much of northern Mali, including Timbuktu, has experienced serious insecurity in recent years, and travel there has been widely advised against; for now the city is, for most, a place to study and appreciate from afar. Its heritage endures, cared for by its own people, and it can be explored through the wider story of Islamic Africa in the destinations catalogue and the guides. When conditions allow, few places on earth reward the traveller's imagination more.

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