But he also taught himself to read Arabic fluently as a boy, and his interest in the manuscripts grew. Haidara spoke Songhoy, the language of Mali’s Sorhai tribe, the dominant sedentary ethnic group along the northern bend of the Niger River, and in school he studied French, the language of Mali’s former colonial masters.
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Over time he learned about the manuscripts’ history, and how to protect them. Haidara would peer over his father’s shoulder as he gathered students around him, regarding the crumbling works with curiosity.
A few years after Laing’s murder, a scribe had written a primer of Arabic grammar over the explorer’s papers-an early example of recycling. One of his father’s most prized works was the original travel diary of Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a Scotsman who had been the first European explorer to reach Timbuktu via Tripoli and the Sahara, and who was betrayed, robbed, and murdered by his Arab nomadic escorts shortly after departing from the city in 1826. Sometimes his father would rummage through the storage room and emerge with a volume from his family’s collection-a treatise about Islamic jurisprudence from the early twelfth century a thirteenth-century Koran written on vellum made from the hide of an antelope another holy book from the twelfth century, no larger than the palm of a hand, inscribed on fish skin, its intricate Maghrebi script illuminated with droplets of gold leaf. Haidara had a sense of their importance, but he knew very little about them. There were thousands of manuscripts at the house in Timbuktu, locked away in tin chests in a storage room behind a heavy oak door.
Consisting of three three-hour sessions beginning before dawn and continuing, at intervals, until the early hours of the evening, the Haidara School was a throwback to the informal universities that had flourished in Timbuktu during its heyday as a center of learning in the sixteenth century. Dozens of young boarders from across the Sahel region of Africa, the vast, arid belt that extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, came to study mathematics, science, astrology, jurisprudence, Arabic, and the Koran at the traditional school that his father ran in the vestibule of their home. In the Haidaras’ large house in Sankoré, the city’s oldest neighborhood, he often heard his father mention them under his breath, as if reluctantly revealing a family secret. ExcerptĪbdel Kader Haidara was a small boy when he first learned about the hidden treasures of Timbuktu. His the story is one of a man who, through extreme circumstances, discovered his higher calling and was changed forever by it. His heroic heist “has all the elements of a classic adventure novel” ( The Seattle Times), and is a reminder that ordinary citizens often do the most to protect the beauty of their culture. With bravery and patience, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali.
“Part history, part scholarly adventure story, and part journalist survey…Joshua Hammer writes with verve and expertise” ( The New York Times Book Review) about how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world’s greatest smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction. His goal: preserve this crucial part of the world’s patrimony in a gorgeous library. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert shepherds.
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To save ancient Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven in this “fast-paced narrative that is…part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract, and part out-and-out thriller” ( The Washington Post) from the author of The Falcon Thief.
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