At his home in the Bella Farandja neighborhood, Abdel Kader Haidara paced the courtyard for long periods of reflection, pondering how to respond to the rebels’ seizure of Timbuktu. Largely thanks to Haidara’s initiatives, the city now had forty-five libraries, ranging from small private archives to ten-thousand-volume collections with exhibition spaces and conservation and digitization facilities that rivaled those in Europe and the United States. Most prominent were Haidara’s Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in the Sankoré neighborhood and the Ahmed Baba Institute, housed since 2009 in an $8 million complex built by the South African government. The forty-five libraries served as repositories for a total of 377,000 manuscripts, ranging from four-hundred-page, leather-encased volumes to single folios, including some of the greatest works of medieval literature in the world.
The immediate threat to the manuscripts from the looting in Timbuktu had passed, but Haidara was gradually realizing that they faced a greater danger. He knew that many of the works epitomized the reasoned discourse and intellectual inquiry that the militants, with their rigid views of Islam, their intolerance, and their hatred of modernity and rationality, wanted to destroy. It was inevitable, he was coming to believe, that the manuscripts would become a target.
To be sure, jihadi spokesmen had appeared on radio and on television twice soon after their capture of Timbuktu, to reassure people that “we won’t harm the manuscripts.” But Haidara and most of his friends and colleagues dismissed the promise as a public relations ploy. “They went on television and assured us, ‘we know the value of the manuscripts, and we vow to protect them.’ And that’s the moment that people got afraid. We knew that they were lying,” said Sane Chirfi Alpha, Timbuktu’s director of tourism and a close friend of Haidara.
Timbuktu’s population, Chirfi explained, was savvy enough to understand that the mere act of acknowledging the manuscripts’ existence implied that the jihadis had them in their sights—and would turn against them when the time was right. “We could read between the lines,” Chirfi went on. “They told us that we had deviated from Islam, that we were practicing a religion full of innovations, not based on the original texts.” Deborah Stolk, the director of the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands, a major funder of manuscript conservation in Timbuktu, initially downplayed the peril, though it became clear to her later that the texts were endangered. “These manuscripts show a community in which science and religion coexisted and influenced each other,” she said. “That community is not in line with the one envisioned by Al Qaeda.”
Emily Brady had anticipated trouble in Timbuktu from the moment the coup d’état occurred in March. An American attorney, scholar, illustrator, translator (of an 1839 French grimoire, or book of the occult, entitled Treasure of the Old Man of the Pyramids), and poverty-eradication specialist in her fifties from Seattle, Washington, Brady (who requested that her real name not be used in this book) had first visited Mali in the 1990s. During that visit, she met Abdel Kader Haidara, and instantly became captivated by the manuscripts.
The texts, she told The New Republic in 2013, “do something for me nothing else ever has.” While keeping her base, an ocean-side house just south of Seattle, Brady began spending more time in Mali: she apprenticed with master bookbinders in Bamako; studied Bambara, the language spoken by Mali’s dominant ethnic group; married a young Malian, and purchased a house near the Niger River in Bamako, where she spent a good portion of every year. “I’m a book artist and book and paper conservator with one side of my brain and an attorney and governance specialist with the other,” she described herself in an online Reddit chat about the manuscripts.
During her first encounters with Haidara in Timbuktu in the 1990s, Brady had been struck by the multifaceted and liberal society revealed by the works, by evidence of an artistic and scientific culture that had flourished alongside devout Islamic traditions in Timbuktu. She relished the manuscripts about musicology—“wonderful books about playing the lute,” she said—and the epic poetry that often communicated powerful and illicit emotions through the clever use of imagery. “A poet would describe a relationship with tea when he was actually talking about a woman’s sexuality,” observed Brady. Both subjects, she knew, were anathema to the Al Qaeda zealots. From her home in the Malian capital, in consultation with Haidara, she had preemptively sent out letters to every contact in her database in late March 2012, a total of two thousand individuals and organizations, alerting them to the danger posed by the advancing jihadi army. She received no responses.
When the rebels seized control of Timbuktu, she recalled two years later, “Abdel Kader called me and he said, ‘If we don’t do something, the manuscripts are going to be affected. They’re caught in a combat zone. They could become something of value to the jihadis politically.’ We pleaded with donors [for money], and still nobody would help.”
A few days after the occupation began, Haidara met with his colleagues at the office of Savama-DCI, the Timbuktu library association that he had formed fifteen years earlier.
“What do we have to do?” Haidara asked them.
“What do you think we have to do?” a colleague replied.
“I think we need to take out the manuscripts from the big buildings and disperse them around the city to family houses. We don’t want them finding the collections of manuscripts and stealing them or destroying them.”
“But we have no money, and we have no secure way to move them.”
“Don’t worry. I will find a solution for that,” Haidara said.
Months earlier, the Ford Foundation office in Lagos, Nigeria, had given Haidara a $12,000 grant to study English at Oxford University in the fall and winter of 2012–2013. The money had been wired to a savings account in Bamako. He emailed the foundation and asked for an authorization to reallocate the funds to protect the manuscripts from the hands of Timbuktu’s occupiers. The money was released in three days.
Haidara recruited his nephew Mohammed Touré, his sister’s son, who had worked with Haidara at the library since he was twelve. Touré idolized his uncle and envisioned spending his life in manuscript preservation; Abdel Kader had tapped him as the family’s next scholar, just as his own father, Mamma Haidara, had tapped him when he was in his teens. “I ran the library, I welcomed the delegations, the researchers, the journalists, anyone who came by,” Touré told me when we met months later in the courtyard of Villa Soudan, a French-run guesthouse on the east bank of the Niger in a neighborhood of embassies and walled-off villas in the Malian capital. He was twenty-five years old, a wiry man with a high-pitched voice, a fidgety, distracted manner, and a pair of cell phones that went off at regular intervals, one for work and one for personal affairs, prompting impassioned bursts of conversation in Arabic; French; Tamasheq, the language of the Tuaregs; and Songhoy, Touré’s first language, spoken by the dominant ethnic group along the northern bend of the Niger.
Touré and his uncle reached out to people they trusted—archivists, secretaries, Timbuktu tour guides, and half a dozen of Haidara’s nephews and cousins. In a coordinated effort, the volunteers went from shop to shop in Timbuktu’s commercial district, buying, as discreetly as possible, metal trunks at a rate of between fifty and eighty a day. They reasoned that if everybody in the group limited his purchases to just two or three chests daily, the activity wouldn’t attract suspicion. “It looks like ordinary baggage. And commercial activities were going on as usual during the jihadis’ time,” Touré explained. When the metal lockers were sold out, they bought lesser-quality ones of wood. When they had purchased every trunk in Timbuktu, they swept through markets in the riverside town of Mopti, a large commercial center in unoccupied territory about 240 miles to the south. When they had bought up every one in Mopti, they purchased oil barrels in Timbuktu and shipped them down by boat to Mopti workshops. In that bustling riverfront city, metalworkers broke apart the barrels and refashioned them into chests—there was nobody in Timbuktu who could do the work—and sent them back downriver to Timbuktu. In one month, they accumulated 2,500 trunks and moved them into storage rooms inside the city’s libraries to prepare for the evacuation.
Haidara searched for safe houses to store the manuscripts. Unsure what kind of reaction he would elicit, he first broached the subject with a female cousin who lived in a house near his in Bella Farandja. “Listen,” he told her. “I want to bring some trunks filled with manuscripts to your house, and I want you hide them there. It could be dangerous. Are you okay with it?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be? I’ll open everything for you,” she said. She led him to a storage room deep inside the house, filled with sacks of grain. “You are free to use this whenever you want.” He reached out to dozens of other relatives and friends. Not a single one, Haidara said, turned him down.
At seven o’clock one evening in late April, Haidara, Mohammed Touré, and several other volunteers met in front of the Mamma Haidara Library and began the dangerous task of packing and moving the manuscripts. They had waited until an hour after dark—when they could work inside the library without attracting the scrutiny of the Islamic Police, who were always on the lookout for suspicious activities. That would give them exactly two hours before AQIM imposed its nightly nine p.m. curfew. Being caught on the streets after that hour, all of them knew, would earn them an interrogation by the Islamic Police and a whipping or imprisonment. Carrying two trunks, the men moved silently across the courtyard, entered the main building, and locked the doors behind them. The rebels had cut the electricity in Timbuktu at night, obliging them to use flashlights—only one or two to avoid drawing attention. Whispering among themselves in the darkness, and guided by the night watchman, they opened the cases in the main exhibition hall and delicately removed the volumes displayed inside. The flashlight beams cut through the darkness, reflecting off the exhibition glass, enveloping the men’s faces and the yellowing manuscripts in an eerie glow. Fearful of discovery but excited by the work, they passed the manuscripts down the line and laid them gently inside the footlockers.
Into the trunks went some of the most valuable works in Abdel Kader’s collection. One prize was a tiny, irregularly shaped manuscript that glittered with illuminated blue Arabic letters and droplets of gold—a twelfth-century Koran written on the parchment of a fish, and a centerpiece of the Mamma Haidara collection for generations. There was a 254-page medical volume on surgery and elixirs derived from birds, lizards, and plants titled Remedies of Internal and External Maladies Affecting the Body, written in Timbuktu in 1684, shortly after the Moroccans ended their occupation and a second intellectual flowering began in the city. A 342-page, eighteenth-century manuscript with sparkling red-inked calligraphy and a fist-sized hole gouged out of it by termites had been selected for display by Haidara to show the extraordinary destructive power of these minute and sharp-jawed creatures. A Koran written in looping Maghrebi script with diagonal and vertical marginalia lay beside a book of Sufic philosophy opened to a cryptic black-and-white diagram. It consisted of eight concentric circles that compared the goodness and brilliance of the original Islamic thinkers to that of subsequent generations. Another prize of the Haidara collection, reflecting Haidara’s belief that Islam in its purist form was a religion of peace, was a manuscript on conflict resolution between the kingdoms of Borno and Sokoto in what is now Nigeria, the work of a Sufi holy warrior and intellectual who had briefly ruled Timbuktu in the mid-nineteenth century. He had been a jihadi, Haidara argued, in the original and best sense of the word: one who struggles against evil ideas, desire, and anger in himself and subjugates them to reason and obedience to God’s commands.
After emptying the exhibition cases, they groped their way in the darkness down hallways, concerned that their flashlight beams would be seen by patrolling Islamic Police, and worked methodically in the conservation labs and library shelves where the bulk of the manuscripts were held. They kept close track of the time, limiting themselves to two hours, packing in as much as they could, often in silence, listening for every suspicious sound. The manuscripts ranged from miniature volumes the size of a contemporary mass-market paperback to large, encyclopedia-sized works, and required artfully arranging, in near-total darkness, to maximize the use of space, like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Because of the speed with which the volunteers were forced to work and the shortage of funding, they used no cushioning, no cardboard boxes, and no humidity traps to protect them from potential damage caused by squeezing and jostling. “The manuscripts are jam-packed in metal footlockers. This means that they are being subjected to risks of damage for lack of padding or protection from one another,” Emily Brady would explain in a Reddit-based plea for funding one year later. “Every time a footlocker is moved, the manuscripts rub against each other causing damage.”
When they had finished the packing, they sealed the chests with padlocks, locked the door of the library behind them, and hurried home down shadowy alleys, keeping a sharp eye out for Islamic Police patrols. The following evening, they returned to the library, picked up the lockers, which now required two men to lift each one, wrapped them in blankets, and loaded them onto mule carts. The packing and transport continued across Timbuktu every evening over the following weeks, employing a total of twenty volunteers. Haidara told nobody outside his fellow librarians what he was doing—not even his immediate family. His wife and children noticed that he was going out every evening and returning late, but he shrugged off their queries. He didn’t want to give them additional reason to worry.
One night a year after the evacuation, a guide led me through the rubbish-filled alleys around Timbuktu’s outdoor market to a rendezvous with a mule-cart driver who had participated in the operation. The skinny young man stood nervously in the street in the twilight and mumbled in broken French that he had picked up dozens of trunks from the Mamma Haidara and other libraries. “We moved them by night, always at night,” he told me, but declined to shed more details or even to give me his name; the occupation of Timbuktu by the jihadis was over, but Al Qaeda was still lurking in the desert just outside town, and nobody yet had the confidence to admit his role in Haidara’s secret smuggling operation. “I can’t say anything more,” he said, and slipped away in the darkness.
In the busy hours between seven and nine at night, before curfew, when the streets were still full of pedestrians and traffic, and their transport would fit in with the bustle of ordinary Timbuktu life, this young man and many others led their donkeys through the sand, cart wheels creaking, and knocked on the doors of designated safe houses belonging to dozens of families connected to the Savama-DCI network. Everything had been prearranged: the mule-cart drivers, couriers, and hosts carried the footlockers by candlelight or flashlight down hallways and stacked them inside storage closets. “They were owners of libraries and their families—sisters, cousins, brothers, nephews. We used dozens of them,” Mohammed Touré said.
At the end of May 2012, while the clandestine rescue was gathering momentum, Haidara traveled to Bamako for an emergency meeting with UNESCO. A dozen UNESCO officials, Mali’s minister of culture, and twenty reporters assembled in a conference room at the Ministry of Culture. With cameras and digital recorders on, Haidara was asked to discuss the peril facing Timbuktu’s manuscripts.
Haidara refused to comment. “If I talk about the situation in front of you here, I could worsen the problem,” Haidara told the reporters. Drawing attention to the manuscripts, he argued, would remind the jihadis of their value. The radicals might hold them as bargaining chips or destroy them out of spite. When the meeting ended, the UNESCO delegates asked Haidara how they should proceed.
“Stay silent,” Haidara advised. “Do nothing. Leave it in our hands.”
Haidara decided, after days of reflection, to remain in Bamako. He insisted that it had nothing to do with his personal safety: in the entire month since the rebel takeover, he had not had a single encounter with Abou Zeid, Iyad Ag Ghali, or any other jihadi in the city. He had deliberately kept a low profile, and none of them had sought him out, or appeared to have noticed him. But he was finding it increasingly difficult to stay in touch with his donors around the world, to keep them updated on the dangers in Timbuktu and to prepare them to donate money should the situation require it. Haidara had a second home in Bamako where he lived with his second wife, the Malian diplomat, whenever he came to the capital, but before the troubles started she had taken up an embassy position in Paris; he told her nothing about the rescue operation, determined to shield her from worry.
Haidara designated Mohammed Touré his proxy in Timbuktu and settled into a drab rented apartment a few blocks from the Niger River, which soon became a refuge for relatives who had fled the north. (He felt it inappropriate to move into his second wife’s home with members of his first wife’s family.) Haidara brought down his three oldest children so that they could continue their education. Amid the insecurity and violence that had enveloped Timbuktu, many of the city’s teachers had fled, forcing their secondary schools to shut down. The children now shared space with their grandmother—the mother of Haidara’s first wife—and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. And the relatives kept coming. With the exception of two short visits to Timbuktu over the following six months, during which he quietly met with his nephew Mohammed Touré and others participating in the rescue, and gave them encouragement, Haidara would remain in Bamako until the end of the occupation.