Charles Stewart: The Threatened Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Saving Sacred Words in a Secular World

The African Sahel region, just south of the Sahara, shares an Arabic literary tradition that dates to the 16th century. Mia has on display a great symbol of that heritage, the “luh”, or memorization board, used by youth in their Qur’anic studies. But memorizing the Qur’an is only the beginning. Less than 10 percent of a typical West African Islamic library deals with the Qur’an.

This talk will explore what’s in the rest of those libraries. We will also compare Islam in West Africa with the other Abrahamic religions. Finally, at a time in which objects and sites of cultural heritage in areas of armed conflict are in increasing danger, what is being done to preserve them? One answer for the threatened manuscripts of Timbuktu is only a few miles away from Mia, at Saint John’s University in Collegeville.

Charles Stewart is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who serves at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern University. He recently compiled The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara (Brill, 2015), an annotated bibliography of 10,000 manuscripts written during the past 350 years by 1,900 authors.

$10; $5 My Mia members, free for African Art and Library Affinity Group members

To register, call 612.870.6323 or reserve online.