Ahmad Baba

Ahmad Baba al-Massufi al-Timbukti was born on 26 October 1556 in Araouane, a caravan town north of Timbuktu, into a Sanhaja Berber family of jurists. He came of age in the Songhai Empire at the height of Timbuktu's golden age, when the city was less a place than an idea: an intellectual and spiritual capital where the Sankore mosque-university anchored a teeming book trade. A Maliki jurist (qadi), grammarian and historian, Ahmad Baba would write more than forty books — by some accounts over fifty — on Islamic law, biography, theology and language, and is remembered as the most celebrated scholar Timbuktu ever produced.

His world broke apart in 1591, when the Saadi sultan of Morocco sent an army across the Sahara and shattered the Songhai Empire. Timbuktu's scholars resisted the occupation; Ahmad Baba was arrested and, in 1594, deported in chains to Morocco on accusations of sedition. He was imprisoned for roughly two years, then held in Marrakesh and Fez for over a decade. The exile was not silence: he was permitted to teach and give legal opinions, and Moroccan scholars are said to have crowded his lectures. Much of the work for which he is remembered — including his great biographical dictionary Nayl al-ibtihaj and Mi'raj al-Su'ud, a treatise that condemned the enslavement of free Muslims of the Sudan — dates from these years away from home. He finally returned to Timbuktu on 22 April 1608, and taught and wrote there until his death on the same date in 1627.

His name did not fade with him. Timbuktu's surviving manuscripts — astronomy, medicine, mathematics, poetry, law, copied and recopied across centuries — survived in family libraries, and in 1973 Mali founded a state center to gather and protect them: the Ahmed Baba Center for Documentation and Research (CEDRAB), today the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research (IHERI-AB). It holds on the order of 30,000 to 40,000 manuscripts — a fraction of the hundreds of thousands believed to remain in Timbuktu's private hands.

That inheritance was nearly lost. During the jihadist occupation of 2012–2013, librarians led by Abdel Kader Haidara secretly smuggled an estimated 350,000 manuscripts out of Timbuktu in metal trunks, by truck and river boat, to safety in Bamako. As French forces closed in, militants set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute and burned roughly 4,200 manuscripts — a real and painful loss, but a tiny fraction of a heritage that had once again outlasted the people who came to destroy it.