The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

The underlying story here is fascinating: illuminated manuscripts representing muslim thinking through the ages are strewn about as family heirlooms in Mali surrounding the area of Timbuktu. Initially scattered in the face of French colonialism that resisted evidence that Africans and Muslims were highly intelligent with a pre-existing deep culture, many of the manuscripts were being ravaged by time and the elements. A single man, Abdel Kader Haidara, heir to his father's own massive collection, was recruited to save the manuscripts and house them in a formal library in Timbuktu. As a native, armed with his knowledge of the local culture he manages to ingratiate himself and buy back manuscripts. As a well-spoken, well-read individual he also manages to ingratiate himself with NGO funders to plan and build a climate-controlled building in Timbuktu to house the documents (despite building the first library on a floodplain by accident and having to ask all of his funders to refund him!) Then Al-Qaeda invades Timbuktu and wants to destroy the manuscripts as they are largely Sufi in origin and have a more nuanced approach to Muslim law. Abdel, aided by his family, “Emily” ([a:Stephanie Diakité 5078224 Stephanie Diakité https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], for some reason her real name is obscured but her bibliography is listed, which confused the heck out of me) and crowdfunding to evacuate the manuscripts to safety.This is a great story. Unfortunately, this is also about all you get of the story in over 300 pages of the Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, which probably would have been better if left as a longform article. It's not all bad: I learned a lot about the major players in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb, Islamic and North African history, and the Tuareg ethnic group, which is something I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to and it was interesting. But the writing style really got to me: a frequent complaint I have of popular nonfiction is it is often multiple longform articles strung together, which requires a strong editor to make it cohere. The Bad-Ass Librarians is the most flawed book in this direction that I've ever read: characters would be introduced and discussed in four or five chapters and then all of a sudden at their sixth mention would get several pages of backstory, much of it redundant to their shorter previous introductions. Acronyms would remain undefined for their first ten mentions then arbitrarily expanded on the 11th. This was particularly unwieldy because I think some parts of the book were originally from unrelated articles and plopped down unedited in the book, which made the whole thing feel very incoherent. Remember the story that I told you was the ostensible premise above? Hammer goes over a third of the book in the middle without mentioning a single person or concept from it, instead giving us the entire backstory of a terrorist who never turns out to be related. My final complaint is that Hammer's self-insertion is really distracting. I love self-insertion in non-fiction (says the girl who's read everything Mary Roach has ever written), but Hammer does it in a way I found intrusive, perhaps because I was frustrated with his diversion from his premise. We hear what he was thinking about while he rode a boat down a river to meet with a source, and what type of iced tea he drank while sitting in a hotel lobby to meet with another source and I did not find it evocative of Northern Africa or introspective I found it completely useless noise.So overall, these is a really weird book: I'm glad I read it because I learned so much about a region and a history that I had little prior knowledge, but I found it extremely frustrating to read.

This book tells the story of how an intrepid librarian from Timbuktu, Mali, collected hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts from all over the country, established libraries for them, and then had to spirit them out of Timbuktu when the region became a war zone.

As part of the story, the author spends quite a lot of time setting up the uneasy relationship between the Malian government and the Tuareg tribes, as well as the introduction of Wahhabi Islam into the region. I learned the names and histories of the three main Al Qaeda commanders, and learned about how they formed an alliance with Tuareg rebels to take over the northern part of Mali and establish a caliphate.

It's a fascinating story that is readable and compelling. My one complaint is that it is much more a story about how Wahhabi Islam is a threat to the culture of Mali than it is a story about librarians or even the texts that were threatened by war. I would have liked to know more about the texts themselves and some of the people who helped protect them, but these were not given the same in depth treatment as the details of the conflict.