Long ago and far away

Natural History, July-August, 2007 by Peter Brown

If you had to name a town, a landscape, a place so remote that getting there would take you to the ends of the earth, few would quarrel if you answered, "Timbuktu." To many people, at least in the West, Timbuktu is the stuff of legend, far more remote and unreal than Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon. According to the BBC, a small survey made last year among young people in England found that a third of them did not think Timbuktu existed at all, and the other two-thirds regarded it as a mythical place.

Of course, Timbuktu is much more than just a romantic state of mind. It's as real as the hot sand from the encroaching Sahara, as real as poverty and resignation, a city of 30,000 souls built a thousand years ago next to a vast floodplain of the Niger River, now a part of the West African nation of Mali. Shortly after we prepared our cover story for this issue, "Space, Time, and Timbuktu" (page 22), I spoke to Marq de Villiers about the time he spent in Timbuktu with his wife and coauthor Sheila Hirtle, doing the research for their forthcoming book, on which their article is based. (For a full audio recording of my interview with de Villiers, go to our Web site for the July/August issue, www.naturalhistorymag.com; a link to the interview will appear under the heading "Featured Story.")

One of the most remarkable things about Timbuktu," de Villiers told me, that the city was a major center of Islamic scholarship. There was a university in Timbuktu [the University of Sankore] that rivaled the great centers of Islamic learning in Egypt and even in Mecca. In the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries scholars arrived from all over the Islamic world to study in Timbuktu. Today there are still substantial depositories of manuscripts and ancient libraries."

So did Timbuktu represent a particular school of Islamic thought? Absolutely, de Villiers replied. The version of Islam that flourished in Timbuktu became a very liberal branch--the rough equivalent of the Jesuits among the Roman Catholics. "They were very tolerant of outsiders, and the intention of most of their schools and scholarship was essentially peacemaking ... and accommodation--a position of tolerance that, as we know, is not universal in Islam.

"The sad thing about this today," he continued, "is that Mali is so poor that many of the young people of Timbuktu and other cities go to the Gulf [Persian Gulf states] to get work and to study. Some of them, alas, get infected with the more fundamentalist, Wahhabi view of Islam." Some of that, inevitably, has come back to Timbuktu. "There's a big squabble going on in the town between the tolerant wing and the more fundamentalist wing of Islam, and it's a fascinating case study. The fundamentalists regard the older and more tolerant people as un-Islamic."

Perhaps Timbuktu is not so distant from the modern world after all.