What is the history of the mosque in Timbuktu?

At the beginning of the 2nd millennium, Timbuktu stood in West Africa as a transit point for camel caravans. As commerce flourished, it grew and became renowned in the Muslim world as a center of Islamic scholarship. It was a university town, attracting scholars from near and far. Its teaching activities were centered in its mosques. These mosques flaunted their wealth to the world and their status as the best of the Muslim cities. The mosques there definitely qualify as Africa's most exquisite examples, if not the best in the world, in terms of earthen architecture.

Timbuktu boasts three mosques made of clay, the Great Mosque being the most famous. The Great Mosque was built in 1325 and has been expanded several times to form the famous Islamic complex. The Grand Mosque includes three inner courtyards and two minarets, one of which is the tallest building in the city.

The other famous building in the city, the Skol Mosque, was built in the late 14th century. Inside the mosque also stands the elaborately decorated minaret, and the prayer hall is square in shape.In the 16th century, it was a place for Islamic scholars to discuss their sermons and further their studies. The house on the north side of the courtyard was the teaching place when the mosque served as an institution of higher learning.

The third large temple is Sidi Yahya Temple, which is also very important. Built around 1440, the Sidi Yahya Temple was extensively rebuilt by the French in 1939. Its construction material is a "stone" (actually a kind of clay, which is called "Timbuktu stone"), so it can not really be considered an earthen mosque.

While the floor plans of the three mosques are distinctive, some aspects are the same. They all have the basic features of a mosque: niches, minarets, and a prayer hall with doors and windows facing the courtyard. The architectural styles of the Skol and the Great Mosque are "Sahelian" in character, i.e., they both have mud-supported walls and flat roofs. They are also characterized by outwardly protruding fixed scaffolding, which was designed to be climbed each year for maintenance, usually by plastering the multi-story minarets. The main material used in both the Skol and the Great Mosque was mud bricks, ranging from rectangular bricks made in molds to roughly handmade tubular and hemispherical bricks. The layers of bricks were built by stonemasons, or "masons" as they are locally called, even though they worked mainly with mud. Before the abolition of slavery, there were also slave laborers who carried clay in wicker baskets and water in gourds under the watchful eye of the foreman. When the pagoda was built, the masons applied a layer of protective clay to the inner core of the mud brickwork and smoothed it with a trowel. In principle, rainwater from time to time washes away this layer of protective clay, but the inner core remains intact.

Timbuktu's location on the edge of the Sahelo-Saharan Desert means that good timber is nowhere to be found, and has to be imported from the densely forested region of the Niger River to the south. To compensate for this, local palms are widely used to build mosques and homes. The roofs of the houses were constructed from palm trunks, and ginger palm was used as a beam between the vertical columns, with blocks of wood built into the narrow space between the beams. On top of the wooden blocks are placed palm mats made of ginger palm fibers, which are then covered with a layer of soil, which is desirable everywhere. The water standing on the flat roof was drained to the street below through gutters made of earthenware or split ginger palm installed in the roof. These drains are now generally made of corrugated iron or smashed flat waste oil drums. Acacia and other woods that could be found were also used to make footings that were embedded deep into the earthen walls. Good timber is used for some internal accessories such as gates and the like.

The style of the Yambaktu mosques is simple. They have none of the decorations that are common in other Muslim mosques - no tiles, no carved beams, no giant chandeliers - and the ornamentation is very limited and very plain. Molded mud bricks can be laid in a diamond pattern, as in the Skol Temple, or coated with a layer of plaster and the pattern carved into it, as in the Great Mosque. Similarly, an ostrich egg, a symbol of Islamic unity, may be placed on top of the minaret. But the real beauty of Timbuktu's earth-built mosques is their protruding buttresses, niches, and the large expanses of flat, sun-dried mud on the conical minarets, which are exposed at the top of the frame.

In recent years, the importance of the Timbuktu mosques has been recognized. They are still used as places of prayer and study for Muslims. They symbolize the character of the area, are a source of pride for the local people and will continue to be cared for and maintained. It is through renovation and reconstruction that the Timbuktu mosques have continued to evolve over the centuries.