Timbuktu Quotes

“We are a city that has had Islam for one thousand years. We had the greatest teachers and universities. And now these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way?”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

“It’s time you go back to your cell. Your phone call is over. If anyone wishes to speak to you now, we have to arrange it.” She said gesturing the guard to come escort me. Only reason you’re getting the guard is because if I’m not restrained in three seconds I’m gonna kick your ass from here to Timbuktu…”
― Bella Shadow, Assassin: The Beginning

“They glided out of the heat-haze on their camels like specters. There were twenty of them, and they were Tuareg. Their faces were hidden by black veils that left only slits for the eyes, and they wore purple robes that fluttered in the desert wind. They carried swords, muskets and seven-foot iron spears, and wore stilettos in sheaths on their left forearms. They were an impressive, sinister sight.”
― Michael Asher, Death in the Sahara: The Lords of the Desert and the Timbuktu Railway Expedition Massacre

“The sun was a fiery furnace of gold, but finally it set in the west and the cosmos glittered like a million burning embers, briefly reminding Awa of poetry readings under starry skies in Timbuktu”
― Rehan Khan, A Tudor Turk

“No, forget it. You people took the village and drove away all our business, it's you who must submit to Shariah.”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts