I am really quite cross.
During the last few years of working
with the three great libraries of Timbuktu I used to put up a ‘manuscript of
the week’ on the Facebook page I created
for the project www. https://www.facebook.com/ELITTOMBOUCTOU
This was in order to show what is found
in the manuscripts- because most of the time people are not aware of the
content of these documents- they just believe what they are told, i.e. that the
manuscripts are a fount of all wisdom, and that it is possible to find every
subject matter in them. This is something of an exaggeration. They are very
interesting for many reasons, but the large majority of them are copies of
canonical Islamic texts, or often talismans or recipes for various forms of ‘maraboutage’.
To me, who is not an Arabist, the subject
matter nevertheless became known to me in quite some detail because when we
were working at Djenne in connection to
the British Library, I had to translate the descriptions of each manuscript’s
subject matter, which had been entered by the Djenne archivist in French. This was something which I really
enjoyed. It brought the manuscripts alive for me, and made the work seem all the
more interesting and worthwhile.
One recurring problem during my 12 years
of working with the manuscripts of Mali has been the reluctance of the
manuscript owners to publish anything online- this is of course a problem when
the project’s aim is to digitize and make available to scholars online the
contents of the libraries!
However, that hurdle has been successfully
crossed and the projects continue. Nevertheless, here we are again, up against the
same old problem: we have been told to stop the publication on our Facebook page online of the Djenne
manuscripts: https://www.facebook.com/DjenneManuscriptLibrary
where I have published over the last year or so, images and descriptions of the
Djenne collection which is being digitized. And every time we publish on
Facebook we make sure that we do it with the consent of the manuscript owner!
And now, last July, a conference was
held in Bamako, organized by UNESCO, at which the representative of the Djenne
Manuscript Library was asked to cease the Face book publications! Asked by whom? This remains something of a mystery to me, but I have been told that the concensus of the assembled grandees was that we must stop.
No one said anything during our three
years publications on Facebook of the Timbuktu manuscripts!
And what exactly are we told to stop? Who
has the right to tell the Djenne Manuscript Library that they should not
publish on Facebook?
It is almost entirely a question of images from Qur’ans with
beautiful calligraphy, or handsomely illustrated Dalā’il
al-khayrāt (Prayers upon the Prophet.) which
have, as I said, been admitted for publication by their owners! I can only
guess that our lively presence on Facebook is making others jealous?
Here are two examples:
"The manuscript of the week comes from
the Traoré 23 family.It is an exegesis of the Qur'an from the 19th century. The
pale writing is the quotations from the Qur'an, the black sections contain the
commentary. It has many marginal annotations in Ajami- Bozo and Songhoy, two
main languages of Djenne.
تفسير الجلالين
Tafsīr al-jalālayn. Exégèse du Saint
Coran"
And another Week's special manuscript:
جزء من المصحف الشريف
Djenne continues to delight with the
beautiful manuscripts that the population keeps bringing in to the library.The
manuscript of the week is another lovely 19th century Qur'an from the Yaro
family.