Slinging mud to rebuild Timbuktu’s past glories

The reawakening of this ancient caravan city hinges much on Alhassan Hassaye and his knack for plying his hands through mud.The holy mud shrines of Timbuktu that Mr. Hassaye’s mason ancestors helped maintain over the past eight centuries are in ruins, flattened by gunmen loyal to al Qaeda who occupied the city last year.This past […]

The reawakening of this ancient caravan city hinges much on Alhassan Hassaye and his knack for plying his hands through mud.
The holy mud shrines of Timbuktu that Mr. Hassaye’s mason ancestors helped maintain over the past eight centuries are in ruins, flattened by gunmen loyal to al Qaeda who occupied the city last year.
This past January, French soldiers stormed the gates of Timbuktu, frightening away the al Qaeda fighters hiding inside.
The troops eventually were followed by European preservationists proffering carbon-dating technology and computer-modeling software-modern tools to help Timbuktians restore their renowned shrines and recapture the city’s past glories.
At 71, Mr. Hassaye is the reigning master mud mason of Timbuktu and now has a chance to redefine those ruins of drab gray dirt back as ancient pyramidal monuments. “If this is what God wants for us, it is an honour,” he said, sitting on a rug in his two-storey home, which is also made from mud.
This local architectural endeavour speaks to the greater challenge of patching the cracks in Malian society. Mali has been broken by a year of war. Its people are consumed with recrimination. Soldiers remain at odds with one another after a coup last year.
And people of the desert north are divided between those who supported rebels fighting to create an independent state, those who stuck by the government and those who backed the al Qaeda gunmen who ultimately wrested and then lost control of the cities.
On July 28, the country will elect a president. He or she will inherit a country awash in guns and grievances.
But in quiet Timbuktu, much of the public debate concerns the shrines. Their restoration symbolizes a desire to reclaim the older, grander identity that predates the country’s modern-day trauma.
Once, Mali was a beacon of medieval learning and wealth, whose celebrity spread far. As much as two-thirds of Medieval Europe’s 14th century’s gold supply passed through a vibrant Timbuktu, often on camelback, according to some scholars. The city’s elders spent much of that fortune raising shrines. The mud monuments housed the tombs of Muslim scholars considered as saints and who were said to offer the dead shade from the desert sun.
Legend held that the shrines kept the city safe from invasion. But in April of last year, al Qaeda militants swarmed with their gun-laden pickup trucks into this now poverty-stricken and desert-encroached city. By June, they had begun bulldozing the city’s largest shrines, apparently because they didn’t mesh with the group’s perception of Islam.
At night, though, mud masons met in each other’s homes to plan for the eventual reconstruction of the shrines, several of the participants said. They have since received a boost from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, which plans to help reconstruct about 15 shrines.
UNESCO hasn’t yet determined the ultimate amount of funding it requires for the reconstruction. To recreate the shrines, the UN agency’s and government specialists are drafting plans from pictures snapped in 1985, when the structures were first listed on a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The specialists also plan to carbon date the clumps from the ruined shrines and sample each for bacteria that could bring down the structures again.
As they do, however, the preservationists are treading onto philosophical ground. Unlike the enduring stone cathedrals of old-world Europe, Timbuktu’s religious monuments are fluid-their shape, size and even style shifting with each fresh coat of earthy gunk as the shrines are maintained over time. The difference reflects the improvisational flare of much of African art, but it also makes the shrines difficult to reconstruct. Their singular architectural feature is their changeability. “It is as the philosophers say,” explained Alpha Diop, an architect appointed to the project by Mali’s Ministry of Culture. “You can never step in the same river twice.”
Indeed, some residents of the city want the monuments to keep changing their nature. But Mr. Hassaye’s is hoping to rebuild the shrines as closely to their previous forms as the art and craft of such mud sculpting allow.
On a recent morning, five sandal makers could be seen arguing furiously over the future of the shrine next door-the tomb of two saints, Talib and Abdallah:
– “They should modernise it!” proposed Yusuf Touré, during the exchange. “Make it bigger. Modernise it with some European materials.”
– “We have no need of that!” countered Yusuf’s distant cousin Bocar Touré. “We need our ancient building back.”
Neither knew who Talib and Abdallah were.
– “Those Europeans who are financing it, they know our culture better than we do!” Yusuf shot back, adding a sting to the exchange.
– “You shouldn’t even think like this,” shouted the older Bocar. “You are crazy!”
When he was 13, Mr. Hassaye’s father pulled him from French colonial grade school to join the centuries of forbearer artisans who made their living in the mud. In fact, there are four families of mud masons in Timbuktu, which before recent troubles had a population of over 50,000. The families have maintained the monument sites since medieval times.
Their profession is toilsome and prestigious in its way, though poorly paid. The force of tradition is strong. In each of the four mason families, “it is absolutely obligatory that at least one child learn to do it,” Mr. Hassaye said. “The rest, they can go be day laborers or whatever they want. But there must be one. If not, [the craft] will disappear.”
Still, Mr. Hassaye is the only one among the families who knows how to raise a shrine from scratch.
Not that there has been much call for new shrines before al Qaeda’s reign of destruction last year. For some time, saints have become rare in Timbuktu. Sons of the town’s Muslim clerics-prime candidates for sainthood-tend to go into business these days, rather than follow their fathers calling. So there are few miracles recorded in the area.
The last time anybody here constructed a new shrine was in 1971, when Mr. Hassaye was 29 and built the spiral monument housing Mohamed Mahmoud, who Mr. Hassaye said was “a great saintly man.”
And Mr. Hassaye knows something about his mud: “If I get four or five clumps, when I hold it in my hand, I can tell you what year I installed it or that this clump is from the 15th century,” he said.
But now, his septuagenarian hands betray a slight tremble and lack the strength for mud masonry on a grand scale. So he’ll need to enlist help for the impending rebuilding project, passing on the science of his trade.
Participation in the coming building works, though, may be his last. “This is what’s left for me,” he said, thanking God over and over again in an interview. “In this life, you have to do something well. So that when you depart, those who are left behind will say: ‘This is what he did. He did this.’”

(This article was published by the Wall Street Journal before the Malian presidential election held on Sunday)