The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts,  by Joshua Hammer, Simon & Schuster, 2016

"Tells the unlikely but very real story of a band of bookish heroes from Timbuktu and their desperate race - past dangerous checkpoints, through deserts, and often in the dead of night - to save a culture and a civilization from destruction.  Josh Hammer has seen firsthand how ordinary people can respond with extraordinary heroism when faced with evil.  He also gives us a dramatic example of what it means to stick with a story; he knows this one from the beginnings the late 1300s up until the present day, with its extremism and acts of cultural repression and erasure.  Hammer has an unerring sense of what matters and his storytelling is impassioned and fun at the same time." 

 Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo

Don't let the tacky title deceive you, this book is an engrossing adventure tale, a modern-day Muslim underground railroad of books, that's right, books, manuscripts, pages, dating back to the 1500s, when Timbuktu was the intellectual center of the Islamic world.

How did he manage it?  He almost didn't.  When Al Qaeda seized control of Timbuktu in 2012, they imposed Sharia law, terrorized the city,  and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts, many of which touched on subjects that the radicals considered blasphemous - astronomy, biology, romantic love, music and sex.  That's right, music, love, sex, the stars - blasphemy.

But Haidara, the mild-mannered librarian, was resourceful.... and sneaky.  As the militants tightened their control, Haidara organized a clandestine and dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of Timbuktu.  The operation worked, and Haidara is now busily digitizing and cataloging - what else would he do, he's a librarian? - hoping for an opportunity to return them eventually to their home. 

How intriguing that a Muslim librarian, at the very opposite end of the scale from the destructive militants, would go public with his story, and continue to work at preservation.   Something tells me that the end of this story has not been written yet.