In 1550 when traveller Leo Africanus wrote, in his Description of Africa, of the teeming markets of wealthy Timbuktu, he was particularly struck by the richest traders, the booksellers. The city was becoming the library of Africa, repository today to hundreds of thousands of priceless ancient manuscripts on poetry, astronomy, maths, geography, much of it the Arab-rescued legacy of classical Greek learning, and innumerable irreplaceable works on Islam’s history. And most particularly of its mystical Sufi traditions.
The relief with which many have greeted the rapid, largely bloodless, retaking by French and Malian troops of the cities of Gao and Timbuktu has, sadly, been marred by the burning by fleeing rebels of much – how much we don’t know yet – of Timbuktu’s archives, one of the great treasures of Africa and the world.
This was not a simple act of wanton vandalism but the culmination of a theologically-inspired, puritan purge against the city’s Sufi population. It has seen 90 per cent of its 330 shrines destroyed since fundamentalist fighters from the Salafist al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took the city, pushing out not only Malian forces but their own Tuareg allies. As did the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, they were also determined to destroy the city’s liberal culture and rich musical heritage, much of it inspired by the worship of Sufi saints, and drove many internationally renowned musicians into exile. Dress codes were enforced in the streets and dissent brutally suppressed.
For Salafists, the statues and saints, poetry and music of Sufism, spiritual tools to worship, represent the idolatrous substitution of intercessions between man and Allah, in effect their equation, for the direct worship of God. It is a theological literalism that finds an echo in Christianity’s older divisions, but expressed with a violent intolerance largely now gone. What Timbuktu’s theological vandals most eloquently expose is the gross mischaracterisation of the critical battle of our age as between “civilisation” and Islam. Far from it.