http://www.africanglobe.net/africa/tombs-arabs-destroying-timbuktus-manuscripts
After Tombs, Arabs Now Destroying Timbuktu's Manuscripts
The city of Timbuktu in northern Mali is not only home to historic mosques and sacred tombs, but also an enormous collection of old manuscripts that illustrate the rich intellectual history of the region. All of this is now under threat from a wave of barbarism by salafists Arabs who have seized control of northern Mali.
European historians long claimed that Africa had no written history or intellectual tradition and that the first light of civilization arrived there with the European colonization. But if there is one city in Africa that dispels this White myth, it is Timbuktu.
Center of intellectual life
This city on the northernmost part of the river Niger, at the edge of the Sahara, was a thriving centre of commerce from the 13th century. There, merchants traded in gold, salt and other commodities. Europeans first arrived to the city in the 19th century, but historians like explorer Ibn Battuta described the city with admiration some five hundred years earlier.
Timbuktu is best known for its historic mosques and mausoleums, where Sufi saints are entombed. But only recently did people realize that, aside from a centre of trade, the city was also a significant centre of intellectual life. In the late 1990s, an international research team found a number of private libraries where prominent families from Timbuktu kept tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts. Written in various African languages and Arabic, the manuscripts showed the world that 13th-century West African scholars were deeply engaged in the study of religious subjects but also logic, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and natural sciences.
Fundamentalist Salafism
West African Islam has been deeply influenced by Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam that favours a metaphorical interpretation of the Qur'an and focuses on the spiritual development of the individual. West African Sufism is also known for its 'enlightened' individuals who mediate between God and humankind and who are also worshipped after they die.
The Arabs who have now seized power in northern Mali are followers of a very different movement: fundamentalist Salafism from Saudi Arabia. Their brand of Islam has no historical roots in West Africa and it rejects Sufism and the mystical veneration of saints as a heresy.
It is the fundamentalist Islam imported from Saudi Arabia and its animosity towards Sufism that has led to the tragic destruction of irreplaceable symbols of West Africa's cultural heritage. Arab Salafist have already destroyed at least three historical mausoleums and they say they intend to raze them all to the ground. Historic mosques and libraries with manuscripts are not safe from these barbarians either. The manuscripts would fetch a fortune on the black market. There is a risk that important testimonies of a rich African scholarly tradition will disappear forever while Africans worldwide sit idle and scared of a few hundred Arabs.
This is so much more serious than we could imagine. Timeless scrolls that have yet to be translated are being destroyed - valuable and irreplaceable elements of Black heritage and human history will be extinguished thanks to religious fanaticism. And yet, no Armies mobilized, no defenders of scholarship, no heritage foundations rushing to stand in the way. This is a tradgedy that future generations will never forgive us for.
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