The institute carries the name of Ahmad Baba al-Massufi, the brilliant seventeenth-century scholar of Sankoré who was exiled to Morocco when invaders conquered his city in 1591, losing his vast personal library in the process. Four centuries later, the institution bearing his name was founded in 1973, financed largely by Kuwait, with a single purpose: to gather, protect, and study the written legacy of Timbuktu. For generations, families across the city had kept manuscripts in trunks and back rooms, inherited heirlooms of a literate civilization that flourished while much of the world assumed Africa had no written history. The institute set out to prove otherwise, manuscript by manuscript.

What the institute preserves is staggering in range. The manuscripts are not only Qur'ans, though there are many of those. They are works of astronomy and mathematics, medicine and law, poetry and history, correspondence and commerce, some dating back centuries, written in elegant Arabic script and sometimes illuminated in gold. They are evidence, in their own hand, that Timbuktu was a city of readers and thinkers, of judges issuing rulings and astronomers charting the heavens. By 2013 a program to digitize them was underway, run by Norway and Luxembourg under UNESCO's eye, though only a fraction had been scanned when the war arrived.

When the city fell in 2012, the danger to the manuscripts was immediate. The custodian Abdel Kader Haidara and a network of librarians and ordinary families began a covert operation that would last months. Night after night, they packed ancient works into metal footlockers and carried them out of Timbuktu, hidden in mule carts, vegetable wagons, and canoes, downriver and overland to safe houses and finally to Bamako, hundreds of miles south. In all, some 350,000 manuscripts were moved to safety. It was dangerous, exhausting work. During the French intervention, a helicopter nearly fired on a boat of manuscripts, mistaking the cargo for smuggled weapons.

Against that backdrop, the arson of January 2013 was a blow but not the catastrophe it first appeared. The roughly four thousand manuscripts lost to the flames had all been copied in digital form, and another ten thousand stored underground survived untouched. The institute's building could be repaired; the knowledge inside it had been carried out of harm's way by the courage of a community. The episode became, against every expectation, a story of preservation rather than loss, of librarians who treated old paper as something worth risking their lives for. In Timbuktu, the written word has outlasted empires, droughts, and armies. It outlasted this, too.