Timbuktu

Overview

Timbuktu is a city in Mali, located on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. In the 15th and 16th centuries it was a leading center of Islamic learning in West Africa. Its three great mosques, Djinguereber, Sankore, and Sidi Yahia, are active places of Muslim prayer, and the tombs of Muslim saints across the city are sites of ongoing veneration. The mosques and sixteen mausoleums form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Present

The three great mosques of Timbuktu are active congregational mosques where daily and Friday prayers take place. Each mosque is maintained by a management committee of the local community, and the Cultural Mission of Timbuktu, a Malian government heritage office, oversees conservation. Every year, residents jointly replaster the earthen walls of the mosques with fresh mud, a communal maintenance ceremony carried out for centuries. In 2012, armed groups occupying the city destroyed fourteen of the sixteen mausoleums and the entrance door of the Sidi Yahia Mosque. Local masons rebuilt the mausoleums with traditional earthen construction, completing the work in 2015. Timbuktu is affected by the ongoing armed conflict in northern Mali.

Religious Significance

Timbuktu holds a central place in the history of Islam in West Africa. From the 14th century, the city grew into a hub from which Islamic faith and scholarship spread along the trade routes of the Sahara. Scholars taught the Quran, Islamic law, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics at the Sankore Mosque, drawing students from across the region, and the city's libraries preserve hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts from this scholarly tradition. Muslims in the region know Timbuktu as the city of 333 saints. The saints are revered scholars and holy men buried in and around the city, and Islamic tradition in Timbuktu holds that they protect it. Believers visit the mausoleums, the small earthen tomb buildings of the saints, to pray and to seek their intercession, the practice of asking a holy person to carry one's prayers to God. The three mosques are places of daily worship, and their upkeep is shared by the community as a religious duty.

History & Structure

Timbuktu was founded around the 12th century as a seasonal camp of Tuareg nomads, close to the Niger River on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. The city grew wealthy on the trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt, and books, and reached its height under the Mali Empire in the 14th century and the Songhai Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Djinguereber Mosque, the largest of the three great mosques, was built in 1327 on the order of Mansa Musa, the ruler of the Mali Empire, after his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Sankore Mosque followed in the 14th to 15th centuries, and the Sidi Yahia Mosque around 1400. All three were restored and enlarged in the late 16th century under al-Aqib, the city's chief Islamic judge. Pyramid-shaped minarets, the towers from which the call to prayer is made, rise above the flat-roofed old town. The mosques and sixteen mausoleums were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.

Additional Resources

• UNESCO: Timbuktu
• Book: Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle (2007)