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Mauritania’s Manuscripts *
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By Louis Werner**
Photographed by Lorraine
Chittock***
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May 04, 2005
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Twelve-year-old Cheikh Ould Salek contemplates Wadan, a caravan town known for its scholars and its libraries. |
One
could easily lose something precious in Mauritania’s million square
kilometers of dune fields and rocky steppes, stretching north from the
Senegal River and east from the Atlantic into the Sahara’s most desolate
corners. Nomadic encampments are few, villages are far between, and the wind
blows inexorably from the west, scattering all that comes before it.
But
Ahmad Ould Mohamed Yahya, director of manuscripts at the Institut
Mauritanien de Recherche Scientifique (IMRS) in Nouakchott, believes it is
not a fluke that something precious should recently have been found in the
small town of Boutilimit, some 150 kilometers (95 mi.) east of the capital
city of Nouakchott: the world’s only known complete manuscript of a work
on grammar by the great Spanish-Arab physician and philosopher Ibn Rushd,
known in the West as Averroës. This find, so far from the Mediterranean
basin, means that historians must rethink just how far Ibn Rushd’s
writings and influence extended into the Arab hinterland.
The
Fame of Mauritanian Manuscripts
The
Treasurers
A
Modest Land With a Great Heritage
Chinguetti
Traditional
Education
An
Indigenous Literary Genre: Nawazil
Calligraphy
The
Future of the Manuscripts
Treasuring
the Written Word
The
Fame of Mauritanian Manuscripts
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Grade-schoolers browse in old manuscripts in the Al-Ahmad Mahmoud Library in Chinguetti. |
Mauritania
is known throughout the Arab world—but hardly at all in the West—for its
enormously rich heritage of Arabic manuscripts, many brought from the Arab East
by pilgrims returning from Makkah, some recopied from those imported sources by
students in the Qur’an schools that once flourished throughout the country,
and others composed by Mauritania’s own jurists, poets, and historians.
“The
traditions of scholarship in Mauritania during the past three centuries, albeit
profoundly linked to the medieval epoch, are probably the richest in West
Africa,” says Charles Stewart of the University of Illinois at
Champaign-Urbana, an expert on the country’s early modern history. “They
compare favorably with [those of] Maghribi societies of an earlier date,” adds
Muhammad Shahab Ahmed, a historian of Arab philosophy. “Whenever I travel in
other Arab countries,” he says, “I just have to say one
word—Mauritania—and everyone wants to talk to me about our manuscripts. The
mere subject opens up for me so many intellectual doors in foreign capitals. The
manuscripts are truly our country’s calling cards.”
The
Treasurers
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Saif Al-Islam shows UNESCO-donated laser prints of manuscript pages to a visitor to the Al-Ahmad Mahmoud Library. “If words are not handed down,” he says, “sometimes the meaning is lost, never to be found again.” |
The
great Egyptian man of letters Taha Hussein was not the only Arab from the East
to recognize Mauritanians’ special affinity for collecting manuscripts. In his
autobiography Al-Ayyam, translated as Stream of Days, he remembers
a well-known Mauritanian scholar at Al-Azhar, the great Cairo university,
Muhammad Mahmoud Ould T’lamid, a fellow at Harvard University: “The fact
that the only existing copy of a work by Averroës has been preserved in
Mauritania is a remarkable illustration of the southern migration of the
scholarly corpus of Al-Andalus and the Maghrib”—Muslim Spain and North
Africa.
Ahmad
Ould Mohamed has been traveling throughout Mauritania for more than 20 years,
visiting private libraries, cataloguing their contents, and exhorting their
keepers to safeguard their written treasures. “I have already seen almost 200
private libraries, some just a humble stack of pages, others quite fantastic
assemblies of learning. I think I have about 100 more to go before I have seen
them all. And before then, I would not be surprised to find another rare
manuscript comparable with that of Ibn Rushd.”
The
Averroës work is called Al-Daruri fi Sina’at Al-Nahw, or What Is
Necessary in the Making of Grammar, and was part of the family library of
the young businessman Baba Ould Haroune Cheikh Sidiyya. “I am a librarian by
accident,” he says modestly, but he is certainly more than that. The library
was established by his ancestor Cheikh Sidiyya Al-Kabir (1774–1868) and added
to by subsequent family savants, book collectors, and writers. Stewart has
called this library “a culmination of the known and studied Islamic sciences
in West Africa on the eve of European penetration.”
After
the death of his father, Haroune, in 1978, Ould Haroune immersed himself in
manuscript conservation work, assisting in Stewart’s cataloging of the
library, helping the government establish a policy on the protection of the
nation’s cultural heritage, editing and publishing the critical edition of the
Averroës manuscript, and now editing his father’s own work, a multivolume
historical encyclopedia of Mauritania.
“The
older students mentioned a certain Sheikh Al-Shinquity,” he wrote, “as a
friend and protégé of the imam. This outlandish name made an odd impression on
the boy, and odder still were the eccentric ways and unconventional ideas which
made this sheikh a laughingstock to some and a bugbear to others. … They
nicknamed him “the passionate Moroccan” and told of the wealth of
manuscripts he possessed, together with printed books not only from Egypt but
from Europe, despite which he spent most of his time reading or copying in the
national library.”
Ould
T’lamid was also a friend of Ould Haroune’s grandfather, Cheikh Sidiyya
Baba, and the Boutilimit library contains correspondence between the two,
including requests to write commentaries on each other’s books. It is still a
sore point for many Mauritanians that after Ould T’lamid’s death, his
personal library was absorbed into Egypt’s national library rather than
returned to his homeland.
To
browse through the 7000-item IMRS collection is to catch but a glimpse of the
country’s entire archive, thought to number nearly 40,000 manuscripts, about
three quarters of them written or recopied locally and the remainder brought
from Fez, Tunis, Cairo, and beyond.
The
oldest work is a 10th-century copy of Al-Mas`udi’s world history Muruj
Al-Dahab wa Ma`adin Al-Jawhar (Meadows of Gold and Treasures of Jewels),
written on gazelle skin. There are such basic texts as the Sahih Al-Bukhari,
a standard collection of Hadith (the authenticated practices and
statements of the Prophet), copied and dated in the year 1872 by Hassan ibn
Muhammad Al-Sirfin, and a copy of the great pre-Islamic poets’ works produced
in the 18th century by Asnid Ould Muhammad Najim in a fine Mauritanian script.
A
Modest Land With a Great Heritage
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This page of Mauritanian poetry from a library in Mata Moulinee, copied in rounded Mauritanian Legrayda calligraphy, touches on aspects of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. |
Unlike
North and West Africa, home of such great “library cities” as Tunis, Fez,
and Timbuktu, Mauritania never had large sedentary population centers. Its four
historical caravan towns, Chinguetti, Wadan, Walata, and Tichitt—all now
UNESCO-designated World Heritage Sites—are, and probably always were, somewhat
removed from the hustle and bustle of great urban intellectual enterprise.
Nonetheless, they are all old towns, and their people are proud of their
libraries. Wadan even claims that its name comes from the dual form of the word wadi,
meaning that it was a town of two valleys—a literal valley of palm trees and a
figurative valley of scholars.
Tichitt
has a new manuscript conservation center which, when its staff is fully trained,
will work with an 18-person association of private library keepers in nearby
Tidjikja. In Walata, a team of Spanish urban preservationists has just completed
a UNESCO assignment to repair the town and stabilize its economic base.
Chinguetti
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Sidi Ould Mohammed Ould Ahmad Sageeyir looks up from work in his library in Tichitt. |
Chinguetti
holds the country’s greatest claim to fame. In fact, for many centuries, all
of Mauritania was known in the Arab East as bilad shinqit, “the land of
Chinguetti,” although the term did not appear in any of the great medieval
Arab geographies. Mauritania’s most famous modern writer, Ahmad ibn Al-Amin
Al-Shinqiti (1863–1913), in his geographical and literary compendium Al-Wasit,
wrote lovingly of his hometown’s special charm. Today, the town is something
of a showcase for private library conservation, and the French especially have
lavished much attention on its first steps forward in this regard.
Four
family libraries there—the Al-Habot, the Al-Ahmad Mahmoud, the Al-Hamoni, and
the Ould Ahmad Sherif—are all quite well organized, catalogued, and open for
both scholarly and tourist visits. In fact, much of the town’s income today
comes from such visits.
The
Al-Habot library is the best known and most thoroughly catalogued. Established
in the 18th century by Sidi Muhammad Ould Habot (1784–1869), a descendant of
Islam’s first caliph Abu Bakr, it grew through wholesale acquisitions of
libraries elsewhere in North Africa as well as by copying locally available
books. Now holding some 2,000 manuscripts, the collection spans the period from
the year 1088, with the only known complete copy of Granadan author Abu Hilal
Al-Askari’s Tashih Al-Wujuh wa Al-Naza’ir (The Correction
of Appearances and Views), to the year 1980, with a more humble
manuscript written in ballpoint pen on lined paper: Taqrir
Hawla Al-Maktaba Al-Habot, a history of the library by the current
keeper’s great-uncle.
The
library of Ould Ahmad Sherif is a more humble affair, guarded by the aged notary
public Muhammad Judu’, who unlocks its creaky door in a mud-plastered
back-alley courtyard with a toothbrush-shaped wooden key. Ceiling panels of
plaited palm fronds permit only a shadowy half light to enter the room, whose
shelves contain cardboard conservation boxes, numbered into the 600s, in which
the manuscripts are held. The library’s core holdings were acquired in the
14th century in Tunis during a buying trip by the library’s founder, Ahmad
Sherif. One work on gazelle skin, the Sharh Mouta’ Malik (Explanation of a
Royal Footstep) by Abd Al-Baqi Al-Zirqani, is thought to be in the
author’s own hand, making it a particular rarity.
The
Al-Ahmad Mahmoud library is kept by an energetic teacher named Saif Al-Islam,
who maintains a public reading room of modern books and magazines (including a
few back issues of Saudi Aramco World) for Chinguetti’s youngsters,
next to the historical collection, which contains some 400 manuscripts and 1,400
documents related to local family history. Saif Al-Islam has a keen curiosity
about how and why the written word travels so easily. “Our library has a
Hebrew prayer book, and I was told that the Kremlin’s library has a manuscript
from here,” he says. “How both got to their respective shelves I can only
wonder.”
Traditional
Education
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A geographical work in a Wadan library describes Makkah in the seventh century; this page shows a diagram of the Ka`bah. |
Despite
the intellectual capital of these town libraries, Mauritania’s scholarly
strength has always been at the grassroots—en brousse, as they say in
French—in the itinerant schools and rural lectures known as mahadhras,
organized by charismatic teachers and scholars always on the move. Ahmad Ould
Mohamed of the IMRS received his baccalaureate degree on the strength of a mahadhra-based
education alone, and with it, he entered directly into law school. “I was the
best prepared in my class,” he says.
One
cannot overemphasize how important mahadhras once were to the education
of Mauritania’s scholarly elite—and to the dissemination of books. “Mahadhra
professors were both printing presses and teachers,” says Ould Mohamed.
“They had their students recopy manuscripts as assignments, and since their
students were not just the young, but sometimes already well-educated adults who
thirsted for higher learning, these copies contained marginal notes and
commentaries of importance to our local intellectual history.”
The
future of mahadhras is very much uncertain, however. A national
conference was recently held that extolled their legacy but worried about their
long-term survival. Pessimists note how many have closed in recent years, but
others believe that mahadhras can “reclaim” frustrated dropouts from
standard primary schooling precisely because they provide one-to-one teaching of
customized curricula, with students grouped together by interest and aptitude,
not by age.
The
example of former minister of justice Muhammad Salem Ould Abd Al-Wedoud is
frequently cited to show how the mahadhra system might be successfully
modernized by providing esteemed professors and a reliable schedule. Ould Abd
Al-Wedoud teaches in several locations in the countryside and in Nouakchott, and
his classes attract top Mauritanian candidates, as well as students from
elsewhere in North Africa, Pakistan, and beyond.
The
American teacher Hamza Yusef, who recently advised the White House on American
Muslim affairs, studied at a mahadhra such as this. His Zaytuna Institute
of Islamic Studies in California is modeled at least partly on his experience in
Mauritania.
Indigenous
Literary Genre: Nawazil
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Illuminated manuscripts, penned on media from the roughest parchment to the smoothest gazelle skin, dazzle the eye and engage the mind. |
Closely
tied to mahadhra education is a literary genre that has thrived in
Mauritania over the last three centuries: the nawazil, or collection of
legal cases presented in question-and-answer format, usually pertaining to the
country’s predominant Maliki school of law.
Dedoud
Ould Abdallah, a professor in the Faculté des Lettres at the University of
Nouakchott, was recently in the IMRS library examining a rare copy of the nawazil
of the 19th-century Mauritanian jurist Abdurrahman ibn Muhammad ibn Talb
N’buya Al-Walati, a native of Walata. “I am looking for variations between
this copy and another I have previously consulted,” he said, “to help clear
up a historical discrepancy. Copyists frequently made mistakes in the main text,
but it is very instructive to have their own marginal notes as a guide.”
Ould
Abdallah notes that the poor physical condition of many manuscripts does not
always reflect poor storage practices. “These manuscripts were read, handled,
and transported over the years by many students in the bush,” he says. “That
some were used to the point of near destruction is only natural, just as it is
natural that the same students who read them should have recopied them time and
time again.”
Calligraphy
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A youngster in Mata Moulinee presents his lesson on a writing board at a mahadhra, a traditional school where scholarship and book copying flourish side-by-side. |
Mohameden
Ould Ahmad Salem is a young self-taught calligrapher who recently published his
university thesis on the history and development of Mauritanian scripts. “Many
people think Mauritanian scripts are purely derivative of Maghribi styles,” he
says, “but this is not so. At a very early period, we adopted Andalusi
calligraphy, which in Morocco developed into Maghribi, but we went our own way
with it.
“Historians
said that Andalusi script had long ago disappeared, but the more I looked at
Mauritanian scripts, the more they looked like Andalusi. If you compare an
Andalusi manuscript from the 12th century and a Mauritanian manuscript from the
19th century, they are so close in style that they could be by the same
calligrapher.”
The
first manuscript known to have been written in Mauritania, according to Salem,
is a collection of advice on how to apply the Almoravid law code, titled Al-Ishara
fi Tadbir Al-Imara, by Imam Al-Hadrami, who died in 1097. It is now
in the Abd Al-Mu’min library in Tichitt, copied in fine Andalusi calligraphy.
By comparison, he continues, the second-oldest local work is a book on
jurisprudence by Sidi Muhammad ibn Ahmad Abu Bakr Al-Wadani, who died in 1527.
It is written in a uniquely Mauritanian style called Legrayda, meaning
“lobed,” because of its rounded edges. Of the four main scripts used in
Mauritania, Legrayda is closest to Andalusi and the most common, as it
was suited to fast, small, and compact copying. “Paper was a rarity back
then,” Salem explains. “In the national museum, you can see the cannon
recovered from a 16th-century Portuguese ship that went aground on our northern
coast. We know that same ship also carried a supply of writing paper from Ceuta
[on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast] that was salvaged by local scribes. The
Mauritanian jurist Muhammad Al-Yadali mentions it in one of his works.”
The
other Mauritanian scripts are Mushafi, an ornamental style for title pages,
poetry, and the Qur’an; Mashriqi, similar to the Thuluth style
of the Arab East, with floating adornments and sometimes outlined letters filled
in with gold; and Sudani, a simple, bold student style, similar to Kufi with its
angular lines and wide-nibbed pen strokes.
The
Future of the Manuscripts
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Women in Tichitt paint colorful designs on book covers and satchels they have crafted from leather. |
Salem
recently addressed the First International Conference on Mauritanian Manuscripts
convened by the Project for the Protection and Development of Mauritanian
Cultural Heritage, an undertaking financed by the World Bank and headed by
Mohamed Haibetna Ould Sidi Haiba. The project aims to coordinate the efforts of
international conservation agencies—including UNESCO, the Al-Furqan Islamic
Heritage Foundation established by Ahmad Zaki Yamani of Saudi Arabia, and the
Bibliothèque Nationale of France—with the work that is spearheaded locally by
IMRS, the University of Nouakchott, and others.
Ould
Sidi Haiba sets forth an ambitious plan to build manuscript conservation labs
throughout the country. One major hurdle to clear remains the unwillingness of
many keepers of family libraries to part with their manuscripts, even for the
short time it would take to fumigate them against termites and stabilize their
damaged paper. Many individuals see their manuscripts as a multigenerational
trust, which should never leave the family’s hands.
To
illustrate this feeling, he tells the folktale of Sidi Abdullah Ould Al-Haj
Ibrahim, a pilgrim from Tidjikja who went to Makkah riding a full-blooded
Arabian stallion that he had sworn he would never sell. In Cairo, however, he
came upon a unique manuscript he could only obtain by trading his precious mount
for it. When he returned home, his friends were amazed that he no longer had his
horse. “Where is it?” they asked. “My stallion has been turned into a
book,” he answered—and that was explanation enough in Tidjikja.
Even
though controlled central storage may be essential when the holding conditions
in home libraries are inadequate, many individual owners prefer to risk their
manuscripts’ continued deterioration rather than hand them over to others.
Forming local associations of private library keepers who agree to pool their
collections, and thus create a critical mass of historical value, is another aim
of the project. With reason, Ould Sidi Haiba fears that when the day comes that
Mauritania’s manuscripts have deteriorated so far that they can no longer be
read, recopied, or even catalogued, they will become the latest addition to his
country’s “literature of memory”—folktales, tribal poetry, and
genealogies—as examples of what his project calls “intangible” cultural
heritage.
Treasuring
the Written Word
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Mohameden Ould Ahmad Salem, a Nouakchott University graduate, taught himself calligraphy and is a specialist in Mauritania’s indigenous calligraphic styles. |
One
of the country’s most famous literary works is the Rihla, or Travels,
of the marvelously named Ahmad Ould T’wayr Al-Janna, “Son of the Little Bird
of Paradise.” Between 1829 and 1834, he traveled from his hometown of Wadan to
Makkah and back. With most of his adventures behind him, and after having been
comically mistaken for the king of Mauritania by the British governor-general of
Gibraltar, Ould T’wayr Al-Janna arrived in Marrakech as the guest of the
sultan. His experience there underscores just how deeply all Mauritanians
treasure the written word.
“He
gave much money so that I could buy books in Fez,” wrote Ould T’wayr
Al-Janna. “We returned to Fez and there, God be praised, we bought with that
money all the heart could desire. My son told Sultan Moulay Abd Al-Rahman of the
quantity of books I had bought. He was amazed at that, and he said to him,
‘God has granted you a miracle, something quite out of the ordinary.’” But
when the report came back that some scholars of Fez, grumbling that a
Mauritanian was buying the best on the market, refused to sell Ould T’wayr
Al-Janna more manuscripts, the sultan himself intervened, making sure “we
could buy what our hearts desired.” A caravan of 30 camels was hired to take
his acquisitions back to Wadan. “By God,” he concluded, “there have been
seen on the trip many kinds of hopes and goals wished for and sought after, and
many boons and favors granted.”
Mauritania’s
Arabic manuscripts are the legacy of such visionary collectors as Ahmad, Son of
the Little Bird of Paradise, and Taha Hussein’s Shaykh Al-Shinquity. It is not
easy to fill their shoes, but their countrymen today—men like Baba Ould
Haroune from Boutilimit, and Ahmad Ould Mohamed of the IMRS—are doing what
they can to ensure that Mauritanian readers of tomorrow will always have
original sources to consult and original works from which to learn their
national history.
*This
article was originally published in Saudi Aramco World ( www.saudiaramcoworld.com),
November/December 2003 issue.
**Louis
Werner is a writer and filmmaker living in New York. You can mail him at wernerworks@msn.com.
***Lorraine
Chittock is a freelance photographer and writer who is working on a
book about her walking adventures in Africa. You can mail her at cats@camels.com.
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