To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean's Eleven. NPR author interview and features at: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/23/475420855/timbuktus-badass-librarians-checking-out-books-under-al-qaidas-nose

A documentary featuring the knowledgeable commentary by African scholars, rich reenactments, and an original musical score by Vieux Farka Touré. Timbuktu was once thriving and a leading cultural, economic, scientific and religious center that made a significant and lasting impact on Africa and the entire world. The film successfully documents that Africa had vibrant scholarly institutions and written cultures long before European intervention. It establishes the importance of preserving the thousands of manuscripts from long ago as an exciting and empowering legacy for Africana scholarship today.

For centuries, trading caravans made epic journeys across the Saharan sands to reach the markets of the legendary city of Timbuktu, where they traded salt, gold, slaves, textiles, €”and books. By the mid-fifteenth century, Timbuktu had become a major center of Islamic literary culture and scholarship. The city's libraries were repositories of all the world's learning, housing not only works by Arab and Islamic writers but also volumes from the classical Greek and Roman worlds and studies by contemporary scholars.The astonishing manuscripts of Timbuktu form the lavish visual heart of this book. Beautifully graphic, occasionally decorated, these exquisite artifacts reveal great craftsmanship as well as learning. All were written in the Arabic script, but not all are in Arabic, for they also feature a range of local African languages.Aside from scholarly works, the surviving manuscripts include a wealth of correspondence between rulers, advisers, and merchants on subjects as various as taxation, commerce, marriage, divorce, adoption, breastfeeding, and prostitution, providing a vivid insight into the ordinary life and values of the day.