Mali Stories
HMML Stories — Mali
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Women in the Courtroom: Legal Documents in Timbuktu
“Despite the vastness of Timbuktu’s digitized archives, it is a collection dominated by men...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
To Timbuktu From a Land Far Away: Migrating Manuscripts
“Texts in West Africa were highly mobile...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
A Decade in Mali
“It began with a dinner in 2013...”
- Dr. Columba Stewart
What Are The Animals Trying To Tell Us?
“In historical Timbuktu—as in any part of the pre-modern world—animals were...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
Eclipses in Early Muslim History — Between Myth and Reality
“The best-known eclipse mentioned in Muslim sources was the solar eclipse that occurred on...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
Nasheeds from West Africa: Uniting Texts and Sound
“All of Timbuktu’s family libraries that were digitized by HMML include numerous compositions that...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
A Scribble of Scribes: Men, Women, and Children Copyists Across Mali’s Manuscript Collections
“...each manuscript is an artistic production and requires physical labor performed by a single individual—the scribe...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
Why so Many Fragments? Incomplete Manuscripts in the Timbuktu Collections.
“A large amount of the manuscripts digitized in Timbuktu, Mali, that we at HMML have cataloged are fragments...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
A Book You Would Love to Read...
“A book you would love to read is lost, altered, destroyed, buried, hidden, left unpublished, unwritten, banned.”
- Dr. Catherine Walsh and Margaret Bresnahan
Smoking in the Desert — Between Supporters and Opponents of Tobacco
“The use of tobacco in the Sahel, whether smoking, chewing, or taking as snuff, was widespread and...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
Tracing Folktales in Magic Texts — The Story of Umm al-Ṣibyān
“Despite having been contested in Islamic history by powerful groups rejecting them as illegitimate practices, magic and...”
- Dr. Celeste Gianni
Creating Cataloging Standards for Regional Names
“Yeɗi belonged to the Fulani people, one of West Africa’s many ethnic groups, which...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
Postscript — A Fāʼidah
“Along with the direct physical resistance to this unjust trade, the text shows...”
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor
Database Partnership Expands Access to West African Manuscripts
HMML is now in partnership with the West African Arabic Manuscript Database
- Dr. Ali Diakite and Dr. Paul Naylor