The Ahmed Baba Institute, officially the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, is a library and research centre in Timbuktu.It was named after 17th-century Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba al Massufi. The centre holds approximately 20,000 manuscripts covering Mali's history, including the Tarikh al-Sudan. The majority of the manuscripts are from the 14th to 16th centuries, and most are written in Arabic but others are in local languages, such as Songhai, Tamashek and Bamanankan, or even in more distant ones, one each in Turkish and Hebrew, with topics covering medicine, astronomy, poetry, literature and Islamic law.
