Good long read on the efforts of Abdel Kader Haidara and the Ahmed Baba Institute to find and preserve rare manuscripts and a reminder of the rich historical intellectual tradition within Islam.

Islamist militants set fire to the Institute in 2014 but many manuscripts were saved and moved to more secure locations:

Nor did Haidara have second thoughts about the life that he had chosen. “I was well paid for this work. They let me do whatever I wanted, and I did it well,” he recalled three decades later. “I had my freedom. And I had a great responsibility. I had to convince people not to lie. I had to convince them to hand over their manuscripts. They gave me this responsibility with confidence, and I had to fulfill it. And when I started reading these manuscripts, I discovered amazing things, and I couldn’t leave them alone. I couldn’t stop reading.” He steeped himself in the lives of kings and savants, in the wondrous encounters of Timbuktu’s intellectuals with the city’s first Western visitors, in the divisions within Sufism over fikh, or Islamic law, and in the ethical arguments of Ahmed Baba and other polemicists.

He was particularly interested in manuscripts that contradicted Western stereotypes of Islam as a religion of intolerance—pointing with pride to Ahmed Baba’s denunciations of slavery, and to the strident correspondence between the jihadi sultan of Massina and Sheikh Ahmed Al Bakkay Al Kounti, a mid-19^th-century Islamic scholar in Timbuktu known for his moderation and acceptance of Jews and Christians. As time passed he became something of a savant himself, revered by many peers in Timbuktu for his knowledge of the region’s history and religion, sought after by parents to offer their children guidance.