Just a piece of paper. Just a little wrap. Just an old statue. Just a mud hut.

The tomb of Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar Mohammed Ben Aqit, which used to stand to the north of Timbuktu in the cemetery that also bears his name, was certainly no architectural marvel. It was a simple one roomed adobe hut, with old wooden roof joists, semi-ornate doors and windows and a rendering of more modern breezeblocks to protect it from the annual rains. During the saint’s lifetime, this modest structure had been part of his home. Around him in the Sidi Mahmoud cemetery lay the tombs of another 167 of Timbuktu’s 333 saints.

When mujahedeen claiming to belong to the Touareg militia Ansar ud-Dine, but more likely to be affiliated directly to Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, came to vandalise the tomb on Friday May 4th 2012, there was little danger of the world losing a grand piece of architectural heritage. This wasn’t the Taj Mahal or the mausoleum of Tamerlane in Samarkand. But something was most definitely lost, something more powerful to local people than art. It was the peace and repose of a friend, a protector; it was a sense of respect and reverence that made life stable and liveable; it was a place to contemplate, to give thanks, to utter supplications for comfort or good fortune; it was a piece of history of immense worth not only to Timbuktu, but to the whole of Africa and the Muslim world.

It was this symbolic value that the Ansar ud-Dine militiamen objected to. “What you’re doing is sinful! Ask God directly, rather than a dead man,” they shouted at the mute crowd who had been carrying out their observances at Sidi Mahmoud’s tomb that Friday of prayer. An angry cluster of bystanders gathered to watch as the mujahedeen, led by a Mauritanian man who had just arrived in Timbuktu for the purpose, smashed the door to the mausoleum and ripped down the thin white veils covering the tomb of the saint. Those veils, left by supplicants in the hope that their prayers would be granted, were then burned in full view of the onlookers. One of them tried to protest, but he was bound, gagged and bundled into the boot of a car. It wasn’t the first such act of religious iconoclasm in modern Malian history, but it was the first to make a victim of the memory of a saint as great as Sidi Mahmoud and it provoked local grief and international outrage.

In important ways, the scenes of vandalism and destruction that were played out in Timbuktu following the Salafist takeover in April 2012 weren’t new at all. There was something very old about them. Mostly white Arabic or Hassaniya speaking men from the northern deserts were ‘teaching’ the blacks how to worship Allah in the ‘proper’ manner. Granted, some of the mujahedeen might have been black Africans from the Nigerian Islamist terror group Boko Haram or soldiers of fortune from southern Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Guinea. But the ringleaders and spokespersons were mainly Arab northerners; either local Berabiche from the Timbuktu region, Sahrawis from northern Mauritania and Western Sahara or Algerians from the Touat and Tidikelt. Some of them were Touareg. Just as the Ikhwan of Saudi Arabia unleashed their righteous ire on the people of the Hijaz, the AQIM overlords of Timbuktu were imposing an alien religious philosophy by force of arms on local people with a very different cultural outlook to theirs and, in this case, a different skin colour too. It was a scenario that had been replayed for centuries along the cultural ‘fault’ line that stretches from Mauritania in the west to the Sudan in the east, separating the ‘white’ Arab and Berber people of the north from the ‘black’ African peoples of the south.

Unsurprisingly, black Malian religious leaders were averse to the idea of being re-educated about Islam whilst men from the north pointed a gun at their heads. Something that characterised many of the local responses to the Salafist occupation of Timbuktu and other parts of northern Mali was the defiant claim that Mali had no need of any lessons from strangers on how to be good Muslims. Mali is proud of its own religious traditions, however innovative and sinful they may seem to the followers of Abd al-Wahab.

After the Islamist takeover there was a constant war of words between the leaders of AQIM, MUJAO and Ansar ud-Dine and the religious hierarchy in the larger northern towns. Points of religious law were debated with the imams of the great mosques, often on absurdly abstruse grounds of contention. A fine example occurred when the Islamist occupiers entered the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu to try and prevent the Grand Imam from using a microphone and loud speakers during prayers. For the Salafis, the use of such a modern technology was anathema simply because it didn’t exist in the time of The Prophet. The imam of Djinguereber turned the argument on its head and asked the assailants to produce the verse from the Quran that specifically forbids the use of microphones and speakers during prayers. The Islamists had no answer and grudgingly left.

“Everything they do is contrary to the principles of Islam,” was the sweeping rebuff expressed by Alphadi Wangara, the imam of Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu, in an interview for the Malian newspaper 22 Septembre. “That’s been obvious from day one. At the first meeting they held with all the imams of the city, they wanted us to believe that they had to come to move Islam forward in Timbuktu. We’ve subsequently learned what their word is worth… We met them and made it clear that we know the principles of Islam. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon his name, explained the word of God to men using his wisdom. We pointed out to them that the very fact they’re trampling our soil, forcing their way into places of worship and roaming around town with their weapons in their hands is forbidden under Islam. All good Muslims know that in order to impose shari’a law, one must be righteous oneself. Whereas these Islamists are far from being righteous men.” The fact is however, that imam Wangara gave this interview in Bamako. In order to speak his mind without fear, he had been forced to leave his home and go into exile. The pride and defiance of Mali’s traditional religious leaders meant little in the face of whips and AK47s.

 

Taken from the book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali by Andy Morgan (Freemuse Publications)

(c) Andy Morgan / Freemuse Publications 2013

Manny Ansar was Tinariwen’s manager at the time. He remembers a whole group of Touareg musicians, ex-rebel leaders and ishumar who spent time together, in each other’s houses, out in the bush or, if they were in Bamako, out along the banks of the Niger, where it was quiet and the nature and solitude reminded them of home. ‘Ishumar’ is a Tamashek adaptation of the French word ‘chomeur’ – the collective noun for the young Touareg men who left their homes in Mali and Niger in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to drought and lack of opportunity to find work in Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and beyond. It was these men who became the foot soldiers of the rebellions of 1990.

Life in the early 1990s was convivial. There was music. Women felt free to come and go. Some people smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. The bonds between those young Touareg, their music and their culture seemed strong and unbreakable.

No one quite knows why some senior Touareg figures from the northeast, including Iyad Ag Ghali, began to succumb to the message of Pakistani preachers belonging to Tablighi Jama’at. Perhaps it was due to a general disillusion with the nationalist cause, fuelled by the bitter in fighting and recrimination between different Tamashek tribes and clans that followed the Tamanrasset Accords of 1991 and the National Pact of 1994. Perhaps they were sick of petty politics and yearned for something loftier, purer, and more holy. Perhaps the very notion of dividing up Muslims into nation states seemed suddenly ungodly. The Wahabi have always preached that national boundaries are a Western imposition, designed to divide and weaken the Islamic umma, which should by rights exist in one borderless and divinely ruled polity.

“The Pakistani Salafists came through Bamako,” Manny remembers. “People saw them with their beards and their white robes. They were nice people. Then they went up to Kidal and that’s where certain Touareg leaders came into contact with them.” It is hard to establish the precise date when all this happened, perhaps sometime in 1995 or just afterwards.

Manny remembers that everything happened very slowly and gradually. “There was a kind of psychological preparation, done in a really friendly way,” he says. “Then certain friends started to distance themselves bit by bit from our circle, people who had liked partying and beautiful women. They were still friends and we would still meet and talk about the situation of the country and the Touareg, but one felt that they were drifting away. They started to disapprove of my lifestyle, the travelling, my friendships with Westerners, the festivals, musicians, alcohol, the life of pleasure. They still had respect, esteem, even friendship towards me but my lifestyle didn’t suit them any more. They left very gently.”

When they came back from their trips to Pakistan and Mecca, the dedication of these daw’ah devotees deepened. “They were really like monks,” Manny remembers, “dressed in white, very simple, eating the minimum, praying all the time, unconcerned about life’s problems except spreading messages of peace, togetherness and, of course, God. The first thing that shocked us is that they asked their wives not to shake hands with men any more. Suddenly you would stop seeing their women at all. They would stay in another room where they entertained their women friends.”

Meanwhile, Manny had helped to launch the Festival in the Desert in January 2001 at Tin Essako, a tiny little village to the east of Kidal. The festival was born thanks to an immense team effort involving Manny and his EFES association, Tinariwen, the French group Lo’Jo and various other French and Malian funders and supporters. The only threat felt during that first edition was that of petty criminality and banditry. The year before some Dutch tourists had been attacked and murdered up near Tessalit, north of Kidal. On the way up to the festival itself, the truck transporting a small PA system that had been flown in from France was stopped by armed bandits. It took the verbal skill and courage of Kheddou Ag Ossade, one of the core members of Tinariwen who later went on to form the group Terakaft, to dissuade the muggers from taking the equipment and ruining the festival.

A smaller event took place a year later in Tessalit, but it was the third Festival in the Desert in January 2003, and the first in the silky white dunes of Essakane which were to become the festival’s permanent home, that really established the event’s worldwide reputation. The number of visitors, both local and international, had tripled or even quadrupled. Well- known names like Robert Plant were present. The stage looked like a proper stage. The sound was of the same professional standard as a festival in Europe. The festival had ‘arrived’.

And still no sign of any Islamists. A month after that 2003 edition of the festival, the GSPC kidnapped 32 European hostages in the Tassili region of southern Algeria, between Illizi and Djanet. It was the first major crisis involving the kidnapping of Western tourists that the Sahara had ever known. Fifteen of the hostages were sent down into Mali, where they were held prisoner while the chief of the GSPC cell, Amari Saïfi aka Abderrazak El Para, negotiated a ransom with the Malian, Swiss and German governments. A team of northern ‘notables’, including Iyad Ag Ghali and Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, were sent to speak to El Para and his men. Links were forged and promises were made then that led eventually through many a twist and turn to the Islamist takeover of 2012.

Taken from the book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali by Andy Morgan (Freemuse Publications)

(c) Andy Morgan / Freemuse Publications 2013