Timbuktu, the city founded as a commercial center in West Africa 900 years ago, is synonymous today for being utterly remote.

Timbuktu, the city founded as a commercial center in West Africa 900 years ago, is synonymous today for being utterly remote.

Timbuktu, the city founded as a commercial center in West Africa 900 years ago, is synonymous today for being utterly remote. This, however, was not always the case. For more than 600 years, Timbuktu was a significant religious, cultural, and commercial center whose residents traveled north across the Sahara through Morocco and Algeria to other parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Located on the edge of the Sahara Desert, Timbuktu was famous among the merchants of the Mediterranean basin as a market for obtaining the goods and products of Africa south of the desert. Many individuals traveled to Timbuktu to acquire wealth and political power.

Other individuals traveled to Timbuktu to acquire knowledge. It was a city famous for the education of important scholars whose reputations were pan-Islamic. Timbuktu’s most famous and long lasting contribution to Islamic–and world–civilization is its scholarship and the books that were written and copied there beginning from at least the 14th century. The brilliance of the University of Timbuktu was without equal in all of sub-Saharan Africa and was known throughout the Islamic world.

Over the past 1,200 years, the Western Sahara area has given birth to powerful empires: Ghana (8th-11th centuries), Mali (13th-17th centuries), and Songhai (15th-16th centuries). The influence of these empires transcends Mali’s current boundaries in its contributions to civilization and culture, particularly through Muslim scholarship. Many peoples, ideas, and goods passed through these empires by land and via the Niger River. Among travelers to the region were many Muslim scholars who came pursuing knowledge and whose scholarship survives in their manuscripts.

In 1960, when the former French Sudan–previously part of French West Africa–became independent from France, it took the name of a historic kingdom in the area that it covers, the empire of Mali. Today Mali is an independent, democratic, culturally diverse, predominately Muslim nation that