Word: imamate
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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About half the surviving works - some illuminated in gold and crimson, others illustrated with maps - are intact. But even the best works are fragile, the pages brittle, the covers damaged. "There are a lot of problems with the manuscripts," says Timbuktu's imam Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, 62, who has bought several manuscripts from locals who need the cash and sense they might otherwise lose them altogether. "Houses collapse in the rain. The termites eat them. People borrow them and never bring them back...
...younger Malians, even in Ber, deep in Mali's remote north, are very different from their parents' generation. Few can read the manuscripts' old Arabic script, and some are beginning to ignore long-held taboos against selling them. When I visit Essayouti, Timbuktu's imam, at home, he shows me four ? 15th century leather-bound manuscripts that locals had sold him the day before for about $200. Many locals, he says, simply need the money, or don't know who will next look after the books. "We are trying to explain to each new generation why these are important...
...haul spindly thorn branches home for firewood, might seem remote and protected. But when I arrived there in May, collectors had recently visited in search of manuscripts, according to locals. "Since April, people have descended on the village from Libya, Burkina Faso, Morocco," says Mohammed Ag Mahmoud, 83, the imam of the tiny community of mostly Tuareg tribesman...
...very quiet, very smiley." - Nayyar Imam of the Islamic Association of Long Island, where Vinas worshiped (New York Times, July...
...backdrop of a worsening economy, in a culture that frowns upon premarital relationships and demands that a man reach a certain level of economic stability before considering marriage. "We have been discussing the issue of harassment for years, because it's an old phenomenon," says Sheik Ahmed Turky, an imam who leads a congregation of several thousand at one of Cairo's largest mosques, Masjid al-Noor. Still, he says, "the pressures of living and the costs of marriage" have added to it. (Read "As Men's Job Losses Mount, Wives Feel the Impact...