History for Timbuktu: Aḥmad Bul‘arāf, Archives, and the Place of the Past

Abstract

Aḥmad Bul‘arāf died in September 1955 and was buried in his adopted Timbuktu. He was laid to rest in the town's Sīdi al-Wāfi al-Amīr al-Arawāni cemetery but it would be hard to identify his grave. Gravestones soon disappear into their natural sandy settings. At the time he was widely eulogized for his life's work as a man of religion, culture, and knowledge. Well-known scholars and copyists of his era composed panegyric verses in his honour. One wrote:What a pity on the sciences and their books/On their owners when this calamity occurred/Their schools and places have become deserted/There's no one in them except crows and vultures/Suddenly today there is a caller and no one to respond/Except the echoes and the tunes of the winds/By Ahmad Bui ‘arāf they were granted a gift/How many lessons were conducted and/You have upheld their loftiness, established their origin/You maintained their essence with your honorable books.Decades later he still lives on in the memories of scholars as a “great hero and famous scholar, reviver of Islamic culture,” as a young writer described him in 1986, in a carefully handwritten essay in a local calligraphic style devoted to his achievement. Composed in “Sudani” script in blue ink with headings in red, when the typewriter, if not the PC, had long ago arrived in the region, this encomium to Bui‘arāf was a fitting tribute to a man who loved the written word. He cared for ideas expressed on paper, for their circulation, and how books could be stored for use in the present and in the future. He was devoted to conserving the manuscript heritage of Timbuktu. His own calligraphy in various regional variants was widely recognized and he practiced it without hesitation in the print age.