Abdel Kader Haidara never could have known what he was in for when he was designated the heir of his father's library of ancient and precious books. Soon he was recruited to traverse the countryside to add to the growing collection in Timbuktu. I'll pause here to note that this book is an excellent antidote to any feelings of inconvenience which are so often inherent to business travel. Haidara's travels are often by camel and canoe and he must take care not to appear too tempting a target to bandits and thieves. There's more than a bit of Dark Star Safari to his travels.
In any event, Haidara is very, very good at his job. In a single year he collects more manuscripts than an entire team of predecessors had managed in the better part of a decade. Soon the city of Timbuktu is home to some 350,000 volumes, many of which are many hundreds of years old. As in, written before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. For centuries, families have safe-guarded their books, locking them in trunks and burying them in desert holes. (The history of these volumes parallels that of the Sarajevo Haggadah in many respects.)
Book-by-book, Haidara has rounded them up from across the Sahara and was nearly as dogged in pursuit of funding to build a library to house them as he was at collecting them. No sooner, it seems, than he has received funding from the likes of the Andrew Mellon Foundation to house, protect, and archive the 800,000 books he and his colleagues have amassed, than Al Qaeda threatens to destroy it all.
Advancing on the former city of scholars, Al Qaeda, as Joshua Hammer explains succinctly, begins imposing Sharia law, chopping off the hands of suspected thieves, stoning to death those suspected of extramarital relations, and burning books. Thus, Haidara becomes a smuggler, building a network of couriers to carry Timbuktu's treasure out of harm's way. The work is fraught with danger of almost unimaginable magnitude, but nothing seems to cow Haidara. He rounds up village elders to testify for his men when they are caught, bribes militants at checkpoints, and just generally becomes a first-rate smuggler.
It is hard to give too much credit to Hammer for what he's accomplished here. He has managed to capture each of the elements of the story, from the geopolitical environment in Mali, to the war on terror, to Mali's history as a French colony, to, of course, the books and Haidara himself. Parts of the book read like a travelogue (Where the West Ends comes to mind), other parts like a biography, but the various story strands are woven together seamlessly and, if I may say so, pretty brilliantly. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a must read for book lovers everywhere.
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