Timbuktu Scholarship: But What Did They Read? Shamil Jeppie, Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town ABSTRACT This article explores some of the works that were used by the scholars based in and around the town of Timbuktu in Mali. It had become a famous place for scholarship by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but what was actually written and read there deserves closer study. There are mention of scholars and their works in the well-known chronicles and biographical dictionaries of the region, but the increasing availability of catalogs from individual libraries and collections in Timbuktu makes it possible to study in greater detail the course of reading—and the types of works writ- ten and copied—in Timbuktu at least since its apogee as a place of study through to the twentieth century. This article looks in particular at one collection, presumed to have emerged around a scholarly circle or possibly a school, and at its Arabic curric- ulum, for it was through immersion in Arabic and a command of its grammar and poetry that a scholar could be taken seriously in Timbuktu. T imbuktu is a place in the Western imagination that was for generations asso- ciated with isolation and with being “the furthest place imaginable,” as the Oxford English Dictionary still defines it. 1 Of course this is an exaggeration, but it has become an accepted turn of phrase, as in “from here to Timbuktu.” One reason for this view is that numerous attempts by Western explorers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth- centuries to reach the town failed and ended in tragedy. Portuguese explorers in the sixteenth-century had heard of the place and believed that they could reach it as they attempted to venture further from their coastal enclaves. In this way, Timbuktu became a historical curiosity and without substance. 2 However, it is a specific place with a lo- History of Humanities, Volume 1, Number 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/687917 © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 2379-3163/2016/0102-0002$10.00 1. The OED online (http://www.oed.com) has no entry for Timbuktu but only for Timbuctoo, which it defines as “used as the type of the most distant place possible.” 2. Books about Western explorers who went in search of Timbuktu abound. For an overview of its history and an introduction to the travelers, see Tor A. Benjaminsen and Gunnvor Berge, Une historie de Tombouctou (Paris: Actes Sud, 2000). A close reading of the travelers is provided in Isabelle Surun, 213 213 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on September 27, 2016 04:18:55 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).