I hope those savages get utterly eradicated, like we eradicated smallpox.

The Timbuktu manuscripts have become a casualty of the war in Mali. A large collection of them has been destroyed by Islamist rebels when they burned the Ahmed Baba Institute to the ground. The manuscripts were priceless world heritage and had to do with art, medicine, science, and ironically included multiple old copies of the Quran.

“The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. In his Description of Africa, published in 1550, the traveler Leo Africanus marvels that in the bustling markets of Timbuktu, under the towers of its majestic mosques, the richest traders were booksellers.

When European empires scrambled for Africa in the 19th century, the continent was seen as illiterate and lacking in history, memory, or literature. Its art was seen as “primitive”, partly because it lacked a written art history.

Timbuktu is a palimpsest in the sand that proves otherwise. Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa’s history from oblivion. Timbuktu is Africa’s city of books and learning that disproved racist myths about the continent. That luminous inheritance is what the Islamists have destroyed.”

UNESCO had been digitizing many of the manuscripts in the last 10 years… I just hope they got to these in time.

Video; Physicist Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the great leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries. Its legacy is tangible, with terms like algebra, algorithm and alkali all being Arabic in origin and at the very heart of modern science – there would be no modern mathematics or physics without algebra, no computers without algorithms and no chemistry without alkalis.

2022-07-15: While the savages were unfortunately not eradicated, many of the books survived.

In a dramatic rescue, most of the documents that escaped the flames were smuggled out.
Now, after years of careful preserving, cataloging, and digitizing, more than 40k pages from one of Timbuktu’s biggest libraries have been made available for anyone to explore on Google Arts & Culture. “Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did. These manuscripts can throw light on part of Africa’s past. There’s been very very little, marginal work on excavating the content of the manuscripts. What exactly can the manuscripts tell us about African history? What can they tell us beyond the different phases of African history, from spirituality to the field of science, to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, logic, philosophy, esoteric sciences?”

West Africa’s wealth of manuscripts provide evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back centuries — in contrast to past claims by Western colonialists and scholars who characterized African societies as oral rather than literate ones.