University of Timbuktu

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"University of Timbuktu" is a modern collective term for a historical scholarly and teaching community which existed within in the city of Timbuktu in what is now Mali, associated with the mosques of Sankore, Djinguereber, and Sidi Yahya. The term refers to a scholastic community that endured for over a century during the late medieval period (in the 15th-16th centuries), producing a number of scholars and manuscripts, most notably within the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence. The term "mosque-university of Sankore" was first coined by the French author and explorer Felix Dubois in 1897, and popularised as the "University of Sankore" by the Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah in 1961, in reference to the mosque most associated with scholarship in Timbuktu. The term 'University of Timbuktu' first appeared in the writings of Flora Shaw, Baroness Lugard in 1905. Neither term was used during the medieval or early modern period, and there is in fact no evidence for the existence of an organised...

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