‘The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu,’ by Joshua Hammer
By BEN MACINTYRE

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU
And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
By Joshua Hammer
278 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.

In the summer of 1826, a Scotsman named Alexander Gordon Laing became the first European to set foot in Timbuktu, a city that would become synonymous with mysterious remoteness. The inhabitants of Timbuktu would have been amused by the British imperialist assumption that their city had been “discovered.” By the time Laing reached the place, it had been a thriving international center for centuries, the economic and intellectual heart of the sub-Saharan world, where travelers, traders and thinkers, ­Africans, Berbers, Arabs, Tuaregs and others gathered to trade gold, salt, slaves, spices, ivory — and knowledge.

While Europe was still groping its way through the dark ages, Timbuktu was a beacon of intellectual enlightenment, and probably the most bibliophilic city on earth. Scientists, engineers, poets and philosophers flocked there to exchange and debate ideas and commit these to paper in hundreds of thousands of manuscripts written in Arabic and various African languages. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper once remarked: “There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.” Timbuktu’s staggering manuscript hoard is the most vivid proof of how wrong he was.

That ancient literary heritage, and the threat it faces from radical Islam, is the subject of Joshua Hammer’s book “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu,” part history, part scholarly adventure story and part journalistic survey of the volatile religious politics of the Maghreb region. The title is quite irritating; the rest of it is very good.

Hammer delights in the explosion of medieval scholarship that took place in Timbuktu. By the 16th century, a quarter of the 100,000-strong population were students, drawn from as far away as the Arabian Peninsula. As one proverb puts it: “Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo.” As well as religious texts, those treasures included works of poetry, algebra, physics, medicine, jurisprudence, magic, mathematics, history, botany, geography and astronomy. Ethicists debated polygamy, usury, conflict resolution and the ­morality of smoking. The thinkers of Timbuktu even compiled sex advice, as imaginative and unreliable in the 16th century as it is today: “The dried, pulverized penis of a lizard placed tenderly into honey then licked will let a man experience full sexual desire and satisfaction.”

The city’s scribes wrote in a variety of calligraphic styles, inks and colors: the African tradition of Hausa with thick brush strokes, the angled Kufic script from Persia and the curved and looping Maghrebi style. The city was a readers’ paradise, its inhabitants “searching with a real passion for volumes they did not possess, and making copies when they were too poor to buy what they wanted.” Eclectic scholarship thrived under the mystical, tolerant form of Sufism that dominated what is now Mali. The city, as Hammer puts it, was an “incubator for the richness of Islam.” But the tradition of open-­minded academic inquiry was also subject to periodic attack from bigots and looters, from bouts of anti-Semitism aimed at the city’s substantial Jewish population, and the ­anti-intellectual rigidity of successive waves of jihadis.

The history of Timbuktu, Hammer writes, is marked by “the confrontation between these two Islamic ideologies — one open and tolerant, the other inflexible and violent.” Radical Islamists saw the manuscripts as heretical, and French colonial forces in the 19th century viewed them as plunder, and so another tradition emerged: that of concealment. The custodians of these priceless documents took to hiding them — inside their homes, in holes or in desert caves. Timbuktu’s intellectual inheritance was not only among the richest in the world, but also one of the most secret.

The hero of Hammer’s story is Abdel Kader Haidara, inheritor and protector of a uniquely fine manuscript collection, a gentle, scholarly man who began gathering manuscripts in the 1980s on behalf of the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research in Timbuktu. Over the course of two decades, Haidara and other dedicated antiquarians scoured the region, buying up ancient texts from remote villages. Hammer estimates that the intellectual patrimony of Timbuktu now amounts to a staggering 377,000 manuscripts.

Then came the 21st-century jihadis, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the latest eruption of Islamic intolerance in the region. In March 2012, briefly combining forces with Tuareg rebels fighting for an independent homeland and armed with weapons from the collapsed Libyan regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi, they descended on Timbuktu.

Having driven out the government forces, the Islamists set about the now all-too-familiar process of religious cleansing, enforcement and destruction. The wide-ranging music selection on Timbuktu radio was replaced by uninterrupted Koranic verse, women were forced behind veils, men made to grow beards. Squads of enforcers ensured strict Sharia observance at the point of AK-47s; citizens who wore their pants too short, or allowed their cellphones to ring with Western tunes, or otherwise violated the minutiae of strict Islamism were liable to thrashing or worse. While the Islamists set about imposing their rules, Haidara and the other librarians undertook one of the greatest cultural evacuations in history: The manuscript collections were secretly packed into metal trunks, loaded onto mule carts, and hidden in private houses and then in the Malian capital, Bamako.

Hammer writes with verve and expertise, but there are two problems with the thriller tone that underpins his story. The first is the question of just how “bad-ass” Haidara really was. While his teams were removing manuscripts, he had evacuated himself to Bamako, offering coordination and encouragement from a distance. This is a perfectly acceptable decision for a middle-aged scholar with two wives and lots of children, but it doesn’t quite make him Indiana Jones.

The level of threat posed to the manuscripts is also debatable. Like most terrorists, the forces of AQIM were on the whole very stupid. The Islamists’ control of Timbuktu focused on wrecking the ancient Sufi shrines, mounting public amputations and boasting on Twitter; the finer points of the city’s cultural heritage didn’t seem to interest them, and as Hammer acknowledges, the manuscript collections were “mostly ignored” until the final stages of the occupation. In January 2013, 15 jihadis made a bonfire of 4,000 manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute. But by that time many of the jewels of the collection were already in safekeeping, and the French military was preparing to oust AQIM in what would be an object lesson in the use of force against radical Islamist forces.

The great Timbuktu manuscript exodus may have been more prophylactic than urgently necessary, but it was a remarkable achievement, nonetheless, bringing together international funders, a network of smugglers and a handful of dedicated local curators. The exfiltration required careful cataloging of the collections, and this may be the most lasting legacy of the episode: The Islamists accidentally drew worldwide attention to Timbuktu’s literary heritage, and enabled the first full accounting of its ­magnificence.

搶救文物…他戰勝恐怖分子

對守護中東與北非文化寶藏的人來說，近來伊斯蘭極端組織的崛起帶來嚴峻挑戰，伊斯蘭國（IS）2014年初占領伊拉克歷史名城摩蘇爾（Mosul）後，便不斷掠奪，破壞清真寺、神殿和教堂，並持續發動「文化滅絕」（cultural cleansing）。

這場伊斯蘭教的文化浩劫中，偶而也傳出戰勝極端主義的文化勝利，例如敘利亞政府軍從IS手中奪回古城巴爾米拉（Palmyra），但也有一些像海達拉（Abdel Kader Haidara）這樣搶救文物的無名英雄。

海達拉今年51歲，居住在西非國家馬利伊斯蘭聖城廷巴克圖（Timbuktu），他是收藏古書的愛好者，也是圖書館管理員。

故事的起點是在2012年4月，當時海達拉剛出差回來，發現馬利政府軍敗如山倒，凱達組織非洲分支「伊斯蘭瑪格里布凱達組織」（AQIM）近千名伊斯蘭恐怖份子已經攻占廷巴克圖。

他看到有人掠奪，耳邊不時傳來槍響，政府機關上空更升起聖戰黑旗，他擔憂城內幾十座圖書館與博物館難可能會遭洗劫，這些博物館珍藏幾十萬件世上罕見的阿拉伯手稿，有些作品是理性討論與知識探索的不朽經典。

一旦恐怖份子搶奪文物，戰利品可能包括海達拉的私人珍藏，例如可追溯至12世紀的袖珍版可蘭經，這部可蘭經寫在羊皮紙上，搭配藍色阿拉伯文字。他的收藏文物還包括探討天文學、詩歌及醫學的手稿。

恐怖份子占領廷巴克圖幾天後，海達拉與同事在圖書館協會辦公室碰面，當時他告訴同仁，需要大家將手稿搬出大樓，分散在家裡，他不想讓恐怖份子發現這些手稿，盜走或破壞手稿。

當時福特基金會曾提供海達拉1.2萬美元的獎學金，資助他在2012年下半年赴英國牛津學英文，但後來他寫信給基金會，希望基金會能變更獎學金的用途，用來保護這些岌岌可危的手稿，結果基金會答應這項請求。

整個過程猶如美國電影「瞞天過海」的翻版，海達拉招兵買馬，找來他的親戚，找來檔案管理員，就連導遊也找來了，八個月內人數擴大至數百人，有人負責打包，有人充當司機。

他們一天採購50至80個行李箱，打包隊伍摸黑偷偷搬運手稿，拉來毛驢將這些裝滿手稿的行李箱運到各地祕密基地。

這群人透過陸路、水路，偷偷將手稿運出城外，一路上他們既要躲過恐怖份子的盤查，也要躲避馬利政府軍。到了2013年1月法國軍隊攻進北部，恐怖份子只破壞4,000件手稿，而廷巴克圖全部古代手稿將近40萬件。

海達拉說，若他們當初未採取行動，肯定會有更多手稿毀在恐怖份子手上。海達拉並表示，許多手稿都顯示，伊斯蘭教是個具有包容性的宗教，但從恐怖份子身上看不出這一點。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/books/review/the-bad-ass-librarians-of-timbuktu-by-joshua-hammer.html

2016-05-02．經濟日報．A8．國際．編譯鍾詠翔