(RNS) — In a former segregated school in rural Virginia, an Islamic college has been reconnecting its mostly African American Muslim students with a legacy of faith and scholarship largely erased from mainstream history.
IQOU Theological College, in the town of Charlotte Court House, for the past two years has housed a small, borrowed collection of ancient manuscripts from the West African city of Timbuktu in Mali, a center of Islamic learning that thrived between the 13th and 17th centuries. It’s also a region where many Africans were kidnapped during the transatlantic slave trade.
Hafiz Hassan Ali Qadri, a Quran teacher at the college, said the 17 manuscripts can offer African American Muslims a concrete link to a part of their ancestors’ history. Seeing handwritten works on law, theology, astronomy and other subjects challenges an enduring narrative that enslaved Africans arrived in the United States with little education or scholarly traditions, he said.
“It goes full circle, showing that this is where we came from — we came from knowledge,” Qadri said. “And what we’re continuing here at the college is knowledge.”
Abdel Kader Haidara speaks during IQOU Theological College’s 2024 commencement ceremonies in Charlotte Court House, Virginia. (Photo courtesy of IQOU Theological College)
The preservation of the manuscripts is largely credited to Abdel Kader Haidara, a renowned archivist who has safeguarded hundreds of thousands of ancient documents at the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, a private manuscript library in Timbuktu. In 2012, when a militant al-Qaida faction seized control of the city, Haidara orchestrated a covert operation to transport thousands of manuscripts to safety in Mali’s capital, Bamako.
Talks of a partnership between Haidara’s library and IQOU College began a decade later, after college staff traveled to Mali and met with him. That visit laid the groundwork for the manuscripts’ two-year temporary placement in Virginia, which is set to end next month.
Speaking to RNS in Arabic from his office in Timbuktu, Haidara said the manuscripts’ presence in the U.S. carries a deep significance.
“The students can find themselves inside the vast words of the manuscripts, wh …