Many of us recall the moment in early 2013 when our newspapers briefly covered the dispiriting news of the destruction of Timbuktu's precious holdings of ancient illuminated manuscripts' by the retreating troops of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (IQAM) as they relinquished control of northern Mali where they had declared a jihad against all ideas and practices that departed from their own vision of a pure Islamic society. What we couldn't know then - and which Joshua Hammer now reveals - is that the IQAM troops only succeeded in destroying a fraction of the city's fabulous manuscript holdings. As Hammer recounts, the majority of these unique and priceless works were in fact spirited out of the city's libraries and cultural institutions in an elaborate clandestine operation, stored in trunks in safe houses and ultimately carried away by brave and defiant individuals to safer towns and settlements, mainly in the south of the country. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is primarily the story of Abdel Kader Haidara, the son of Mohammed 'Mamma' Haidara, a respected scholar and collector who not only possessed a substantial family library of manuscripts but who was among the first to work - with support of UNESCO funds - towards the collection and preservation of the region's manuscript heritage. Abdel Kader Haidara reluctantly and belatedly took up this family business, which largely involved travelling door-to-door across desert communities persuading families to surrender their private manuscript libraries to the increasingly well-endowed institutions that could provide restoration and preservation services, together with climate-controlled storage. Having worked for years to build these collections and to ensure the security of this important cultural heritage, it was Abdel Kader Haidara who then conspired with members of the local community to remove them from these highly visible central repositories in Timbuktu where they sat all too readily in the path of the IQAM troops.
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