Latest / Timbuktu: Africa's Forgotten Center of Knowledge — Fexingo History
The Secret Libraries of Timbuktu's Women
In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the hidden world of Timbuktu's female scholars and the private libraries they built and preserved. Long before the Moroccan invasion, women like Nana Asma'u, Fatima al-Suqayriya, and Khoja Fatima amassed collections of manuscripts on law, poetry, and astronomy, often inheriting and expanding their fathers' libraries. The episode focuses on a 17th-century figure, Aisha al-Siddiqa, a little-known scholar whose library catalog survives in the Mamma Haidara Collection. Lucas explains how women used the Maliki legal principle of waqf to…
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