Sankoré Madrasah

Let's go back to education.

Timbuktu, University of Sankore.

This deserves its own moment because it is one of the most quietly extraordinary facts in all of world history.

While parts of medieval Europe are popular, if too simply remembered as a time of limited literacy across the clergy, the city of Timbuktu was home to the University of Sankore and associated centers of learning, where scholars numbering in the thousands studied astronomy, mathematics, medicine, theology.

You know, we sit here so many times, we talk of the, the, the university in Fez by the, the, the, is it, I think Fatima Fi- Fihri, the first-

Al-Khwarizmi-

Bana Empire, all those things.

You know, the, the, the Sankore University- Mm-hmm ...

in, which is one of the oldest universities in, in, in Africa.

Sankore University in Mali, the Katsina Mosque, because mosques were centers of learning- Mm ... was a campus of the Sankore University.

Strangest because nothing quite like it had been attempted before in this part of the world at this scale, and because its effects would prove in the centuries that followed more durable than the empire that gave it birth.

The University of Sankore had existed in some form before Musa's return from Mecca, a mosque with an attached tradition of teaching, modest in its origins, the way most centers of learning begin as a handful of students gathered around a single respected scholar, meeting wherever shade and quiet could be found.

Musa did not invent Sankore.

What he did was recognize its potential and then apply to it the same patient, resource-rich patronage he had applied to Al-Sahili's mosque, transforming a local teaching tradition into something with the gravity to pull scholars across the width of the Islamic world.

He funded the construction of proper buildings for the institution, again in the earthen style Al-Sahili had pioneered at the Djinguereber, though Sankore's architecture served a different purpose.

Not the singular grandeur of a great mosque, but a cluster of smaller structures, courtyards, and covered galleries where teaching could occur in the relative cool of morning and late afternoon, chambers where manuscripts could be copied and stored away from the destructive combination of humidity during the rains and the omnipresent dust of the dry season.

He established stipends for scholars willing to relocate to Timbuktu, an offer that, given Mali's reputation for wealth following the Cairo pilgrimage, proved difficult for ambitious young men across North Africa to refuse.

The scholars came.