Abdoullah ould Ghoulam dons soft white gloves before taking the book from the shelf. “This manuscript is very precious,” he says in the Habott Library in Chinguetti, an ancient caravan town in Mauritania, West Africa. Termites have gnawed holes in the paper, the leather cover is about to fall apart. But most of the Arabic text is still legible. “This is a book by Ibn Rushd,” says Ould Ghoulam. “Known to you in Europe by the name of Averroes. The original dates from the twelfth century. This copy was made here in Chinguetti around 1800, with pen and paper.”
Everywhere in the Sahel, the transition zone between the tropical rainforest and the Sahara, there are libraries with large collections of ancient Arabic scientific texts. The trans-Saharan trade laid the foundation for this from about the year 1000. In addition to camels with merchandise, Islam and Arabic writings also traveled south from North Africa. Just like Timbuktu, in neighboring Mali, Chinguetti developed into a scientific center. “Scholars and students gathered here,” recalls Ould Ghoulam. “They copied other people’s works or wrote treatises themselves.”
In addition to religion, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, local scientists published social reflections on issues such as racism from about 1500 onwards. The Sahel is an area where light-skinned populations of North African origin live together with more dark-skinned populations from southern parts of the continent.
To put it mildly, relations were not always good
Abdoullah ould Ghoulam Habot library
“To put it mildly, relations were not always good,” says Ould Ghoulam. “Often there was war.” The Almoravids, Arabized Berbers from present-day Mauritania who established an empire that stretched into Spain in the eleventh century, had their home base in the Azougui oasis near Chinguetti. Among other things, they subjugated the old Ghana empire with the capital Koubi Saleh. Local scholars tried to justify the conquests with arguments from the Qur’an and hadith (stories about the life of the Prophet Muhammad). To distinguish themselves from blacks, the Arabized Berbers called themselves beydan, the plural of ‘white’ in Arabic, a name they use to this day. They called dark colored population groups sudanthe Arabic plural of black.
The Arabic texts from the Sahel have great cultural-historical value. Until the arrival of Islam and the associated Arabization, almost the entire population was illiterate. Only the Tuaregs had their own script (tifinagh), but probably hardly anyone in the Sahel used that. The inscriptions on rock walls that have survived in this language are almost all from areas north of the Sahara.
As a result, ancient Arabic texts, of which at least a million are preserved throughout the Sahel, are the only surviving written historical sources. Some consist of no more than a page of notes, sometimes written on gazelle skin. Studying these long-ignored texts offers new insight into the cultural history of the region.
Racial tensions
Among other things, the manuscripts cast doubt on the proposition that racism of white versus black is a colonial invention, as the influential Indian-Ugandan anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani claims. According to Mamdani, affiliated with American Columbia University, the current racial tensions in Rwanda and Sudan, among others, are rooted in the import of Western ideas. Critics doubt that, including Canadian historian Bruce Hall. Arabic texts from Mauritania, among others, show that racism of white against black was already widespread in the Sahel long before the colonization by France, from about 1900 onwards.
Scientists in the Sahel were inspired by Arab colleagues from North Africa and the Middle East. “Ibn Khaldun was particularly influential,” says Bruce Hall, one of the greatest scholars of Sahelian Arabic manuscripts. Like other Arab scholars, Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the fourteenth century and taught in Tunisia and Syria, among other places, believed that the black race was inferior. “Ibn Khaldun wrote, among other things, that blacks resemble stupid animals. Both in appearance and in their manners.”
In his acclaimed book A History of Race in Muslim West Africa Hall, affiliated with the American University of Berkeley, reports on four centuries of racism in the Sahel. Research of Arabic manuscripts from Mali and Mauritania, among others, forms the basis of his research. “In addition to Ibn Khaldun, the Egyptian scholar Al Suyuti was also influential,” recalls Hall. Al Suyuti, who lived a century later than Ibn Khaldun, wrote positively about racial differences. “Compared to whites, he said blacks were courageous, strong, hospitable and cheerful.”
There was discussion among local scholars about the extent to which white and black population groups had equal rights. “Al Suyuti claimed that by converting to Islam blacks could reach the same level of civilization as white populations,” says Hall. Other scientists disagreed. Al Maghili, who, like Al Suyuti, lived in the fifteenth century and lived in present-day Algeria, was one of the most influential representatives of a more intolerant approach. “Al Maghili did not believe that blacks could be taught civilization. According to him, even if they converted, they remained inferior to whites.”
Slave trade
In the centuries that followed, scholars in the Sahel elaborated on the ideas of colleagues elsewhere in the Islamic world. Among other things, they questioned whether blacks could be enslaved under any circumstances. This question was important because the slave trade had been an important source of income for white populations in the Sahel since Roman times. They kept some of the slaves for their own use, and drove the rest as cattle across the Sahara to North Africa. In Moroccan cities such as Guelmim and Marrakesh, they sold the human commodity for a profit.
You should not capture Muslims as slaves, thought almost all the scholars in the Sahel. But they often made an exception for black Muslims, so they were often traded as slaves. Ahmed Baba, a famous scholar from Malian Timbuktu, wrote in the early seventeenth century based on Islamic legal texts that this was not allowed. Sharif Hama Allah, a scholar from the town of Tichitt in Mauritania, disagreed. He thought that a black person always remained a slave, even if he or she had converted.
The level was comparable to European universities of that time
Yahya ould al Barra anthropologist
The discussions created a vibrant scientific climate in Chinguetti. “The level was comparable to European universities at the time,” says anthropologist Yahya ould al Barra, one of Mauritanian’s foremost experts on ancient Arabic manuscripts. There was a lot of exchange with other scientific centers. Apart from Chinguetti, scholars also gathered in other Mauritanian caravan towns, such as Oualata, Tichit and Ouadane. “There was also intensive exchange with cities such as Fes in Morocco and Sokoto in Nigeria.”
In his home in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, Al Barra is sitting on a carpet on the floor. He makes tea on a gas burner and smears sandwiches with date paste. “Bought during a recent scientific conference in Morocco.” According to Al Barra, who teaches linguistics at the University of Nouakchott, the fact that scholars in the Sahel already questioned racism of white against black in the Middle Ages proves how progressive the scientific climate was. “In America and Europe, racism was not seriously discussed until around 1900. In Mauritania we already did that three hundred years ago.” Incidentally, local scholars had no equivalent for the word racism (the term is only a century old), but distinguished between white and black with Arabic words such as ‘irq (race), qawm (people) and qabila (tribe).
Human nature
According to al Barra, the fact that racism is a colonial invention, as his colleague Mamdani claims, is untenable. “I think racism is intrinsically linked to human nature. As an anthropologist, I know better than anyone that civilizations around the world tend to classify people based on racial characteristics. One’s own kind is always at the top of the ladder of civilization.”
For many years, Timbuktu was home to the largest collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Sahel. Since jihadists affiliated with al-Qaeda occupied the north of the country in 2012, more than 300,000 manuscripts have been moved to the Malian capital Bamako, fearing they would otherwise be lost. The Dutch Prince Claus Fund, among others, financed the evacuation, for which Western lenders raised more than half a million euros. In his book The Bad-Ass Librairians of Timbuktu American journalist Joshua Hammer writes that part of that money was used to bribe jihadists. Otherwise they wouldn’t let the manuscripts through.
Read about the movement of manuscripts: Timbuktu wants his famous manuscripts back
Mauritania also receives financial support for the conservation of manuscripts, although jihadists are not a problem here. Alesco (Arab League Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the Arab equivalent of the UN organization for the protection of cultural heritage Unesco, provides financial support, among others. Mauritania also receives money from Italy, Spain and Germany, among others, to conserve, restore and digitize manuscripts.
Deep in the desert, the written word is held in high esteem
Bechiry old Mohamed IMRS
The Institut Mauritanien de Recherches Scientifique (IMRS) in Nouakchott coordinates the initiatives. “We have already cataloged 56,000 texts,” says Bechiry ould Mohamed, director of cultural heritage at IMRS. “But I’m sure there’s a lot more.” According to Ould Mohamed, many Mauritanian families have extensive book collections. “Nomadic families sometimes carry suitcases full of ancient texts for generations. Deep in the desert, the written word is held in high esteem.”
Tent camps with students
In his office in Nouakchott, Ould Mohamed tells that there were no universities in Mauritania like in Europe. Scientists usually gathered in mosques. Students were given room and board in scholars’ homes, where they often lingered for years. “Sometimes whole tent camps with students arose in the middle of the desert.” Among other things, the home of cheikh Mohamed Fadel, in the desert north of Chinguetti, grew into a scientific center in the nineteenth century.
Due to the many high-quality publications, Chinguetti was nicknamed the ‘seventh city of Islam’. “Scientists from Mauritania were held in esteem throughout the Arab world,” says Ould Mohamed. Remarkably enough, skin color was of minor importance among scholars. Black scientists who excelled often automatically received the predicate white in the course of their lives. They would have had distant white ancestors, who had produced darker offspring through intermarriage with blacks. In that case, not skin color but intellectual knowledge determined which race someone belonged to.
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