WASHINGTON — “Our ceilings are not very tight,” says Abdel Haidara of the houses in his native Mali. He was talking recently at the Library of Congress in one of the library’s more ceremonial rooms.

After a brutal ten-month occupation of Timbuktu, jihadists fled that city in Mali in February of this year—but not before burning all the ancient manuscripts they could find. The city’s Muslim ...

JOHANNESBURG – An Islamic extremist can't summon the necessary fervor while making a video hailing the jihadi cause in a scene from "Timbuktu," an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film that is ...

Chief arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown is writing from Mali, where he is reporting for his series “Culture at Risk,” exploring the problems and solutions to arts and culture threatened by war, natural ...

Even when you get past the eerie-coincidence level of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Oscar-nominated “Timbuktu” — a film about the causes, consequences and contradictions of Islamic extremism, made by an ...

JOHANNESBURG – A South African university says a limited number of manuscripts in the fabled city of Timbuktu in Mali were damaged or stolen by Islamist extremists as they fled the city. The ...

When it comes to distant destinations, no name is quite so evocative, so utterly haunting, as Timbuktu. Used by us all to connote a far-flung spot off all the maps, it's somewhere that a great deal of ...

Our adventure in the great African desert was triggered by an invitation extended from the Wheeler Opera House stage in fall 2004. Habib Koite, a Malian performer, spoke of the Festival of the Desert.

TIMBUKTU, Mali — At the entrance to this fabled city, Malian soldiers clutching Kalashnikov rifles didn’t dare approach the truck. Instead, they shouted from a distance of 15 feet for the passengers ...

But as it turns out, only 4,000 documents were burned by the rebels. The rest were smuggled out of Timbuktu six months before the incursion by a team of local families who have long safeguarded their ...

TIMBUKTU, Mali (Reuters) - Patrolling Timbuktu's maze of mud-brick houses, the French troops quickly lost their way, their jeeps stuck, wheels spinning, in the sand of the ancient Saharan trading town ...

Some of my earliest memories are of my father’s bedtime tales. Once he told me how, becoming tired of south London, he had decided to go on an adventure. He went to a local garage, hired a camel and ...