The air inside is stale, redolent of mildew and earth ... an Islamic scholar from the town of Djenné, migrated north to Timbuktu, then a city of perhaps 100,000 and a religious, educational ...

This event spurred the great dispersal of the Timbuktu libraries. The re­maining collections were scattered among the families who owned them. Some were sealed inside the mud-brick walls of homes ...

Home of the prestigious Koranic Sankore University and other madrasas, Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and ...