The news that Ansar Dine rebels occupying the ancient city of Timbuktu in northern Mali have been continuing their campaign of destruction against the city's ancient mausoleums, describing them as un-Islamic, has refocussed international attention on this Islamist rebel group, which has taken control of the north of the country and is fighting the Malian government in the capital Bamako. Last Friday, the French government declared that it was sending French troops to Mali to assist the Malian government in fighting the Islamist rebels. French President François Hollande said that he had taken the decision to intervene at the request of the Malian government and with the support of other west African states. “The operation will take as long as is necessary” to defeat the rebels, Hollande said. “The terrorists should know that France will always stand ready to defend the rights of a people, that of Mali, that wishes to live in freedom and democracy.” UN Security Council Resolution 2071, passed on 21 October 2012, declared the Security Council's readiness to send military forces to Mali to assist the government in retaking the north of the country. Resolution 2085, passed on 20 December, authorised the deployment of an African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA) to assist the Malian authorities in defeating the rebels. In July last year, the government of Mali formally requested the International Criminal Court to investigate reports of human rights abuses by the Ansar Dine rebels in northern Mali, indicating that the group's destruction of the country's cultural heritage could also be considered a war crime. This could open the way to the eventual prosecution of at least the rebel movement's leaders. For the time being the destruction is continuing, and on 25 December Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, the UN's cultural agency, expressed international outrage at the destruction of the mausoleums, some of which date back to the west African Songhai Empire, based in what is now Mali, which flourished between the 15th and 17th centuries, and to the Malian Empire that preceded it. “I call on the whole of the international community to act as a matter of urgency and take the measures necessary to guarantee the protection of this heritage,” Bokova said. “Such wanton destruction of these inestimable treasures is a crime against the people of Mali.” Earlier, UNESCO had placed the ancient city of Timbuktu, which enjoys international protection as a World Heritage Site, on its list of heritage in danger of destruction. According to reports circulating late last year, the Ansar Dine rebels have vowed to destroy all the mausoleums in the areas under their control on the grounds that they could be idolatrous. The BBC quoted rebel spokesmen as saying in July that they intended to destroy all the mausoleums, presumably including that of 16th century Songhai emperor Askia Mohamed in nearby Gao, also a World Heritage Site, which is one of the most important architectural and religious structures in west Africa. The mosques and mausoleums in Gao and Timbuktu, examples of the traditional earth architecture of the region, are built of mud bricks faced with mud plaster, typically with scaffolding timbers projecting from the façades allowing easy access for replastering. It is the renewal of the mud plastering each year following the rains that gives the buildings their characteristic rounded shapes, the timber scaffolding lending them a dramatic spiky profile. It is not only the built heritage of the Malian and Songhai empires that may be at risk. Timbuktu and surrounding areas are home to some 900,000 early manuscripts, most of them unrecorded and kept in private archives. Reports last year indicated that these manuscripts could also be at risk of destruction, looting or illicit smuggling abroad. Many of them are believed to be in a poor state of conservation, and the violence spread by the rebels in northern Mali is frustrating Malian and international efforts for their protection. The manuscripts are described in detail in French journalist Jean-Michel Dijan's Les Manuscrits de Tomboctou, secrets, mythes et réalités (Lattès, October 2012), published in Paris at a time when international concern was growing at the actions of the Ansar Dine rebels in northern Mali. As Dijan notes, they are important not only because of what they have to tell modern readers about the history and culture of this part of west Africa, but also because the manuscripts, the vast majority of which are written in Arabic, help to dispel the idea that early and early modern Africa had no written history. Two of the manuscripts in particular, Abdel-Rahman Al-Saadi's Tarikh Al-Sudan, and the Tarikh Al-Fettach by Mahmoud Kati and Ibn Al-Mokhtar, discovered by European travellers to Timbuktu in the 19th century and later edited and published in Paris, provide historical accounts of west African history until 1655, in the case of the Tarikh Al-Sudan, and 1599, in the case of the Tarikh Al-Fettach. Both were written by west African Muslim scholars, and both indicate a high level of historical consciousness. In addition, there is the “biographical dictionary” of Ahmed Baba, which, composed in 1596, contains details of the area's cultural history, together with the 18th century anonymous text the Tadhkirat Al-Nisayan, which contains an account of the area's later history under Moroccan rule. The manuscripts typically consist of unbound folios, most of them written in Arabic and some written in west African languages such as Fulani, Hausa or Wolof using Arabic characters. Ever since the arrival of Islam in this part of west Africa from perhaps the eighth century CE onwards, Arabic had been used as Latin was in mediaeval Europe as a language of religious expression and for scholarly debate. By the time the mediaeval Arab traveller Ibn Battuta visited in 1352 the region was already known for its learning, its mosques and its great wealth. There are famous accounts of the pilgrimages to Mecca made by the Malian Emperor Mansa Musa in 1324-5, which took him through Cairo accompanied by a retinue of 8,000 and an enormous quantity of gold, and of Askia Mohamed in 1496-7, for example. Schools and universities were set up throughout the region to promote Islamic learning. According to Dijan, in the 15th century there were 25,000 students in Timbuktu alone following a course of study similar to that at Al-Azhar in Cairo and studying with local scholars in what seems to have been a variant on the tutorial system. A whole industry of copyists and commentators grew up around the city's mosques and schools to feed what Dijan describes as the system's distinctive features of memorisation and commentary. Texts would be recast in verse format and memorised by students who were often studying in their second or third language, and the surviving Mali manuscripts contain many examples of such cribs designed to help the students digest often difficult material. While surviving collections of religious rulings, or fatwas, provide ample evidence of the sophisticated legal reasoning of local scholars, as well as of the types of questions addressed (having to do with inheritance or property rights, for example), sometimes the Timbuktu scholars conversed with their colleagues at Al-Azhar more directly, as did Al-Sudani in his Masail ila Ulema Misri (Questions to Egyptian Scholars), written in 1605. As well as containing fascinating material relating to the history of west Africa and the curriculum of early modern courses of study, the manuscripts also have much to say about the area's mental horizons and worldview. Dijan emphasises what the manuscripts can tell us about the pre-modern west African legal system, particularly regarding the rights and responsibilities of individuals, its medicine and cosmology, and the scope and limits of government. One 15th century text, the Misbah Al-Arwah wa Mizan Al-Arbah Liman Husa Bihaqiqati Al-Salam fi Al-Kifahi by Abdel-Karim Al-Maguli, an advisor to the Songhai emperor Askia Mohamed, is explicitly presented as a “lamp” of good governance much in the way that Machiavelli's The Prince is designed as a “mirror” for rulers. According to Al-Maguli, the ideal ruler should follow the religious law, act for the good of the community as a whole, pay particular attention to the appointment of officials, and pay proper attention to matters of taxation and expenditure. The destruction of the mausoleums, carried out in the name of a puritanical understanding of Islam, has shocked Malian and international public opinion. It would be an additional tragedy if the Ansar Dine rebels now decide to destroy the Malian manuscripts, the vast majority of which have yet to be properly studied or translated.
