#alquaeda — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #alquaeda, aggregated by home.social.
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Saving science and scholarship from marauders
I just finished Joshua Hammer's _Bad-Ass Librarians_. It recounts the complex and dangerous effort to gather hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts from private homes around #Timbuktu, where they were in danger from rot and termites, to collect and repair them in the Ahmed Baba Institute (in Timbuktu, funded by #Kuwait), to evacuate them surreptitiously to prevent their destruction in the 2012-2013 #AlQuaeda invasion of northern #Mali, and finally to ensure their safe return to Institute. Plus, great title.
Recommended, partly for the history (new to me) of the medieval golden age of #Muslim science and scholarship in northwest #Africa, centered in Timbuktu, and partly for the example of a small band of Malian librarians to save their cultural heritage.
Of course there are also ominous parallels to current news.
