![]() ![]() So you had a thriving commercial center side by side with a Cambridge/Oxford-like atmosphere of fervent scholastic activity.Īl Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb swept to power in Mali. At the same time, you had this academic tradition. Several of the great travelers of the Renaissance, in the 15th-16th centuries, passed through Timbuktu and described it as a thriving commercial center with camel caravans and traders on boats on the Niger River bearing everything from linens and teapots from England to slaves and gold out of the rain forests of Central Africa. Put us on the ground during its golden age. ![]() Timbuktu has become a byword for the farthest corner of the earth. But it was once an important cultural and artistic center. Speaking from his home in Berlin, Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek bureau chief in Africa, recounts the tale of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts-and explains how the Timbuktu manuscripts disprove the myth that Africa had no literary or historical culture, why Henry Louis Gates had an epiphany when he saw them, and why the jihadists found them so threatening. ![]()
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