Timbuktu

Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara in present-day Mali, was a great centre of trans-Saharan trade and of Islamic learning from the 14th-16th centuries, home to the Sankore mosque and a renowned tradition of manuscript scholarship. The jurist and scholar Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (d. 1627) was its most celebrated son; the traveller Ibn Battuta visited it in the 14th century.