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Mauritania’s Manuscripts *
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By Louis Werner**
Photographed by Lorraine
Chittock*** |
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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