Timbuktu: An Illustrated Talk by Alexandra Huddleston

Tuesday, January 12, 2016, 7pm at Vassar College, Rockefeller Hall 200

Supported by a Fulbright grant, the photographer, Alexandra Huddleston, lived in Timbuktu, Mali, for ten months in order to photograph the city’s culture of Arabic language scholarship, a tradition of learning and teaching that has been passed down from teacher to student since the fifteenth century.

Located at the edge of the vast Sahara Desert, Timbuktu was little known in the West—except as a byword for the remote and exotic—until militant Islamist groups destroyed many of its religious shrines and ancient manuscripts in 2012.

Huddleston’s work captures a way of life and learning as it was shortly before the militants overran the city. The photographs show a culture of moderate Islam that is under threat—a deeply rooted, ancient Islamic tradition of tolerance, erudition, and faith—and a city that has built its very identity around scholarship and a love of books and learning.

This illustrated presentation tells a story of discovery: exploring a rich and beautiful African intellectual culture, that of the ancient manuscript libraries of Timbuktu and the culture of scholarship that created them.