Abdel Kader Haidara is a Malian librarian whose story is recounted in Joshua Hammer’s essay, “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts).”

In 2012, along with his colleagues, he organized the rescue of more than 350,000 ancient manuscripts of Islamic culture from the destructive violence of fundamentalist jihadist militias. In April of that year, upon returning from a business trip, he discovered that Timbuktu was under the control of a thousand Islamic extremists.

He was concerned that the Islamists might destroy invaluable manuscripts—which depicted a tolerant view of Islam from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the city was a thriving commercial hub with over 150 universities—Haidara successfully secured funding from a scholarship awarded by the Ford Foundation to facilitate the transfer of these precious books. Along with relatives, archivists, library staff, and local tour guides, he organized the safe transport of the manuscripts from Timbuktu to Bamako, the capital of Mali, which was further east and out of the control of Al Qaeda.

For eight months, hundreds of volunteers worked at night, transporting boxes filled with books on donkeys from one safe location to another. The “smuggling” of manuscripts was particularly challenging due to the numerous checkpoints: those set up by jihadists in the Timbuktu area and those established by the Malian army in government-controlled regions. Some manuscripts were also damaged during searches conducted by soldiers and guerrillas looking for weapons.

In January 2013, despite Haiara’s efforts, Al Qaeda militiamen set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu, which housed nearly 100,000 manuscripts. Shortly after, the French army intervened in northern Mali to quell the conflict. The Islamists had already destroyed around 4,000 manuscripts, which, although significant, was a small percentage considering that the city had nearly 400,000 manuscripts before 2012.