Sankoré Madrasa

Sankoré was founded in the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, financed by a Tuareg woman of the Aghlal tribe, and grew into the mosque most closely associated with teaching in Timbuktu. The building standing today is not that first mosque. Between 1578 and 1582 the chief qadi of the city, al-Aqib ibn Mahmud ibn Umar, had the sanctuary demolished and rebuilt; the seventeenth-century chronicle Ta'rikh al-Sudan records that he had measured the Kaaba with a rope on pilgrimage and set out the new prayer hall to those dimensions. The result is a squat pyramidal minaret and a mud-brick hall bristling with toron, the palm beams that let masons climb the wall to replaster it. Timbuktu's scholars were deported to Morocco after the Songhai defeat at Tondibi in 1591, and the mosque's long decline dates from then.