Transcript
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Dan Snow (1:22)
Hi everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit when we landed, we saw instantly that the airport had been blown apart by a bomb. We crunched across broken glass to pass through the arrivals lounge. I always remember the ceiling panels hanging down the sort of walls and partitions usually so strict at an airport. They were all rent asunder. We just walked wherever we wanted. There's something very jarring about seeing the familiar signs that govern our modern world. Utterly disrupted, we live and die by the exit sign, the arrivals arrow. To do this, do that, stop the car here, public signage. It almost feels like the kind of hallmark of modern, complex industrial living. So when you see those kind of signs defiled and upside down and broken on the floor, it makes you question the whole basis of how we live and organize ourselves. Makes you realise how artificial everything is. And one of those smashed signs had, well, one of the world's most famous place names, Timbuktu. We hurtled into town down a back road. The main road was prone to ambushes, I was told. Our Land Cruiser crashed up and down the divots and the potholes. But as we neared the centre we found felt like we were thrust back centuries. Narrow streets, buildings rising up to the honey colored smooth walls of ancient buildings like The Jangarebeh Mosque, one of the great buildings of Timbuktu, one of the great buildings of the world. The sun's rays are so punishing, they baked the outside of that building. Inside, the corridors were dark and cool. The city had just been recaptured from militants. And I was there to look at the. A really astonishing process. It was underway. Timbuktu had been a center of learning and culture and art. More on that in a second. And as a result, thousands of manuscripts have been produced over the centuries. And they were there in libraries. Those libraries, those manuscripts had been threatened by the militants, and a huge number have been hidden by ordinary people, buried in yards, stuck in cupboards in their houses. But now they were back, and there were dark, quiet labs full of people hunched over, patiently digitizing every page. What I was seeing was part of a process, I suppose, that had begun centuries before. If we scoot all the way back to the early 14th century and place ourselves just on the edge of the Sahara Desert, north of the Niger river, we'd have been looking out over a vast ocean of sand. Big, wide, blue skies. But what's so strange, perhaps a bit like the Nile in Egypt. What's so strange is you see the lush banks or river in the distance. The Niger brought with it life and greenery along its banks, but it also brought trade and luxury goods. And where that river met that desert, well, you get one of the commercial intellectual centers of the Islamic world. It was called Timbuktu. And in the 14th century, it was the heart of a mighty Malian empire. You'll heard of the Malian empire because on this podcast, we talked about Mansa Musa. He was its wealthiest ruler. He was the man who caused a bout of hyperinflation in Egypt when he went to visit because he brought so much gold, so much coinage with him. He was the man that's often said to be the richest man in history. Whether or not Elon Musk competes, we do not know. Timbuktu in that period, became rich camel caravans, thirsting for rest, thirsty for water and food after their journey across the Sahara, made their way through the hustle and bustle of the markets and the town squares. The call to prayer echoed across the city. And in those squares, traders exchanged gold from further south for huge blocks of salt from North Africa. And as so often, if there's wealth and trade, well, there's learning, there's art, there's culture as well. Beautifully decorated scrolls began to be produced, manuscripts written on Italian paper and goat skins. Scholars in Academic institutions studied the writings of the Prophet Muhammad, the translated works of Greek philosophers. And for centuries, the city would play a crucial role in trade, but also the spread of Islam across West Africa. It also was the conduit for much of their West African gold to the rest of the world. That gold of West Africa fueled the wealth of Islamic empires like Al Andalus in what is now Iberia and Spain, largely. And the scholars of Timbuktu pushed ahead. They made discoveries in the fields of medicine, astronomy, and maths that the Islamic world would become so renowned for in the medieval period. Period that was the patrimony, that was the legacy that was saved by the brave people of Timbuktu when extremist Islamic militants seized the city in 2012 and may well have destroyed that priceless cultural collection. I wanted to find out more about Timbuktu. So joining me on this podcast talk about the magnificent West African city is Kai Mora. She's a writer, historian, a PhD student in African and African American studies at Harvard University, and she specializes in the music and religion of the Western Sahel. So here she is, Talk all about Timbuktu. Enjoy.