By Alexandra Huddleston, Guest Contributor
Alexandra Huddleston is a documentary photographer who has worked extensively in West Africa. Most recently, for ten months over 2006 and 2007, she worked on a Fulbright grant project titled “Islamic Scholarship in Timbuktu: a Photographic Documentation,” in Timbuktu, Mali. Additional information about Ms. Huddleston and the captions for the photos in this post are found at its end.
During my first month in Timbuktu, when I wandered down the sandy streets under the blazing sun, and into town, the kids would shout “toubab!” (white foreigner) and beg for change. Sometimes adults did as well. When I went to the dusty and infernally slow cyber-café for thirty minutes of virtual contact with the rest of the world, the young hustlers tried to sell me Tuareg daggers at astronomical prices or cage a gig as my guide.
In contrast, by my last months in Timbuktu, I couldn’t walk half a block without an acquaintance waving, 
without a friend pausing to pass the time of day, or without the kids yelling “photo!” begging me to take their picture. Indeed, I learned what all citizens of the town knew: which back alleys to take if I was in a hurry, so I’d actually make a meeting on time, without too many cordial delays.
I recently returned from over ten months in Mali, much of that time spent on the edge of the Sahara desert in the town of Timbuktu, on a Fulbright Student, Islamic Civilizations Grant. I was researching and photographing a project documenting the tradition of Islamic scholarship in Timbuktu. Timbuktu was a world center of Islamic learning from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and the town still houses over 100,000 ancient manuscripts. Over the last eight years the Malian government and a handful of private individuals have been working with foreign donors to properly house, catalogue and restore this scholarly heritage. My work was to document the traditional Arabic scholarship that produced this valuable cultural legacy.
During the course of my Fulbright, I learned an immense amount about Islam and about West African history, but perhaps my experience of living in a small town, a tightly knit community, was just as important as my research. It was certainly an essential part of my research.
While in Timbuktu I lived with a Malian family who run the Fondo Kati, a private manuscript library that has 
received funding from the Spanish government to house and preserve over 7,000 manuscripts. The family traces its roots to both the Visigoth kings of Spain and the Sonrai emperors of Mali. Indeed, I slept no more than 30 feet away from those ancient manuscripts. I also worked closely with Savamba-Dci, a Malian NGO that has received funding from the Ford Foundation to help house and preserve private manuscript collection throughout Mali.
I gradually realized that in a small town everyone knows almost everyone else, and moreover this interconnectedness is woven into the very fabric of the culture, especially into the system of traditional Islamic learning.
There was a half abandoned building across the street from the Fondo Kati where Ismael, the head of the family, allowed an itinerate marabout to stay with his students. Soumaila, the marabout (a teacher in a traditional Koranic school), ate for free at the foundation and was good friends with Younoussa, another traditional teacher who lived a couple of streets over. Both Younoussa and Soumaila were not only teachers, but also students of Hamou, one of the most well respected marabouts in town, with whom I studied Arabic for a few months. (Indeed one of the aspects of traditional Islamic education that most impressed me was that every scholar, from the youngest boy or girl learning his to write to the most venerable imam, insisted that his learning never ended.) Hamou also taught at one of the most important early morning maglis (a traditional school for older students), where the Hadith were read every morning at 5:30 with the elderly Sidi Lamine, a descendant of the Kounta family, famous for having brought the Al-Qadiriyya branch of Sufism to West Africa. It also happened that my favorite bead vendor was also a regular at Hamou and Sidi Lamine’s maglis. I could go on with such examples.
As I became more aware and more personally involved in this extensive web of social relations, it began to change how I perceived the topic of my research. One of the most controversial aspects of traditional Islamic education is the itinerant marabout. Many traditional Islamic teachers stay in one town, and students study with them only during the day, often attending public school as well. But some marabouts still travel from town to town, seeking learning and a living. They take their young students with them, and the students must beg for their food as the marabout seldom has any means. In larger towns, the practice has become corrupted and often has been turned into an entrenched system of child begging, even exploitation. But, in its traditional context -- and as it is still practiced in Timbuktu -- the “begging” was a means for the whole community to support the children’s education. In this way, even children from families with nothing could learn.
In Timbuktu the itinerant marabout Soumaila was our neighbor. A casual tourist who came down the street I lived on might have been horrified and filled with pity to see Hama, a crippled boy of about ten, swinging across the sand on his crutch, begging for his dinner. I knew, however, that Hama was the nephew of Soumaila, his teacher, and was studying alongside his brother. They got their lodging, water, and other small necessities free from the Kati family, and most of the time he was begging for dinner from neighbors who knew him and his marabout quite well. He studied a lot and in his free time played with other the kids on our street. I realized that the life of an itinerant marabout and his students was by no means easy or ideal, but it was much more rational and supportive than it appeared at first glace.
I titled this entry “Know thy Neighbors” because during my Fulbright I realized that knowing your neighbors is essential, not only to good cross-cultural research but also to good diplomacy. If we only extend a vague smile and distant respect to our neighbors -- as we so often do here at home -- we will never know our world or our local communities well enough to truly achieve any sort of cross-cultural understanding much less develop sound foreign policy.
All photographs by Alexandra Huddleston: Photo captions and notes follow - top to bottom.
Mahamane Mahamoudou (L), also known as Hamou, is one of the most active teachers in Timbuktu’s traditional system of education. He teaches at a maglis almost every morning and evening. The student in the center is Younoussa, an itinerant marabout. Photo by Alexandra Huddleston.
An older boy works on memorizing passages from the Koran at the Koranic school of Tajir Ahmed. Timbuktu’s traditional scholarship is a culture in danger of eroding, both from the social changes brought about by growing contact with the outside world and growing prosperity – what is often vaguely called globalization – and by preachers from the Middle East pushing for a more fundamentalist Islam. An uneasy balance now exists between tradition and change. It is as yet uncertain how these forces may destroy, transform or co-exist with each other. Photo by Alexandra Huddleston.
A young woman visits her extended family during the three-day wedding celebration. She is dressed in a Western wedding dress for the civil ceremony at the mayor’s office.
Abdel Kader Haidara catalogues some of his families 9,000 ancient manuscripts. Abdel Kader is the president of Savamba-Dci, a Malian NGO that has been working with the Ford Foundation to preserve Timbuktu’s private family libraries. Photo by Alexandra Huddleston.
Islam in West Africa, and in Timbuktu in particular, is highly influenced by Sufism. Sufism is a branch of Islam that emphasizes the need for the believer to draw closer to god by letting go of the material world. In this photograph a member of Boubacar Ibrahim Boubey’s zawiya uses his prayer beads during a group prayer. Women are not normally allowed to attend a men’s zawiya, but exceptions can be made. Photo by Alexandra Huddleston.
Mali Map credit: Perry-Castenada Map Collection, University of Texas.
Alexandra Huddleston (www.alexandrahuddleston.com) biographic information continued from top of post: Huddleston earned her MS in broadcast journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism in 2004, and her BA in studio art and East Asian studies at Stanford University in 2001. As a photographer who often works in the developing world and on under-represented issues, she may be categorized as a “concerned photographer”. Her concern, however, is not to change the world. It is, rather, to open doors between cultures and individuals through photography and, in so doing, to enable them to decide how and if they want to change their worlds.