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. ![]() 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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