Chinguetti

A thousand-year-old library, and the dunes coming for it

Chinguetti is a ksar, a fortified desert town, on the Adrar Plateau of northern Mauritania, east of Atar, with a population of 4,800 in 2013. A wadi splits it into an old quarter and a new one. The older houses are of reddish dry stone and mud brick with flat roofs timbered from palms, and many have hand-hewn doors cut from massive acacias that have long since vanished from the country around. Courtyards crowd along narrow streets leading to the mosque.

The land was once savannah: rock paintings in the nearby Amogjar Pass show giraffes, cattle and people in a green landscape. The town was founded in AD 777, and its name means spring of horses in Azer, an extinct dialect of Soninke heavily mixed with Berber. By the 11th century it was a trading centre for the Sanhaja confederation of Berber tribes, who merged with the Almoravids, and the stark, unadorned buildings reflect the strict Malikite Islam the Almoravids spread across the western Maghreb. After two centuries of decline it was effectively founded again in the 13th century as a fortified stop for trans-Saharan caravans linking the Mediterranean with sub-Saharan Africa. The walls are gone, but much of the old quarter dates from then.

For centuries Chinguetti was where pilgrims of the Maghreb gathered on their way to Mecca, and it became a holy city in its own right for those who could not make the journey; it is sometimes called the seventh holiest city of Islam. Its schools taught rhetoric, law, astronomy, mathematics and medicine alongside religion, scholars debated Islamic law around the Rue des Savants, and the whole of Mauritania was known in the Arab world as Bilad Shinqit, the land of Chinguetti. Five manuscript libraries of scientific and Qur'anic texts survive in the old quarter, many from the later Middle Ages.

The Friday Mosque, a 13th or 14th-century dry-stone building whose square minaret is capped with five ostrich egg finials, is widely seen by Mauritanians as the national symbol, and an offshore oilfield is named after the town. In 1996 UNESCO listed Chinguetti with Ouadane, Tichitt and Oualata, caravan towns of the 11th and 12th centuries that became homes of Islamic culture. The desert is pressing in: high dunes mark the western edge, and several houses have been abandoned to the sand. Visitors come for the libraries and the architecture, and to slide down the dunes.