| The manuscripts that make up the Boutilimit collection come from the private library amassed by Haroun ould Sidiyya Baba (1917-1978) who had spent the last thirty years of his life reconstituting the library and letters of his great-grandfather, the Moorish savant Shaykh Sidiyya (d.1868) as well as his wider family’s literary record (from Sidiyya’s mentors in Timbuctu (Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti and his son Sidi Muhammad), Sidiyya’s son, Sidi Muhammad (d.1869), and his son, Sidiyya Baba (d.1926). | At his death Haroun left over 100,000 folios of manuscript material that was microfilmed and catalogued in 1987/8 (the beginning of the AMMS project). The description of that process can be found in the introduction to the catalogue as well as several journal articles that focused on the construction of our bilingual, computer-based finding aid. |
| The significance of this collection lies, first, in its very breadth – roughly 100 years of book collecting (ca. 1810-1910), interspaced with letters and treatises from and about Shaykh Sidiyya, his son, grandson and two of his great-grandsons. This representative work of four generations of scholars within the same family includes 700-odd pieces of their correspondence, in addition to the literary works they consulted. | Second, this four-generation ‘slice’ of intellectual life is linked to one of West Africa’s premier scholarly lineages, the Kunta savants in the Timbuctu region where Shaykh Sidiyya studied for twelve years (1810-23), and includes over 130 letters Sidiyya copied from his Kunta mentors. |
| One copy of the film is available for consultation at the University of Illinois Library Archives, filed under “C.C. Stewart Collection”; two other copies of the film were returned to Mauritania in the care of Baba Ould Haroun, custodian of his father’s collection, for deposit in an appropriate national repository. The originals of these manuscripts remain in Boutilimit in the care of Baba Ould Haroun. |
| AMMS assigns serial entry numbers that appear as the individual record number; citations to the item’s actual collection location appear as the “Collection #” referring to the reel and film location on that reel. Each reel is made up of 20 strips of 36-exposure film spliced together. Citations in AMMS refer to the reel and the spliced film, thus a citation “23/16” refers to reel 23 and the 16th strip of spliced film on that reel; a filmed ‘target’ for each manuscript identifies the item on the film within that 23/16 location. | A manuscript that begins at reel 63, film 18 and continues through to the 5th film of reel 64 would be noted as “63/18-64/5.” All filming was conduced under natural light and without the intrusion of sophisticated technology resulting in the re-filming of about 5% of the first 86 reels; re-filmed items are noted in the catalogue. It is unlikely that the original collection remains today in the same order in which it was preserved following the microfilming that followed the sequence of filming. |
| The range of subject headings used in this finding aid marked the beginning of a process of refinement that continued with the Nouakchott collection and has, imperfectly, been applied to other collections entered in the AMMS. It is neither comprehensive nor definitive. An effort was made to arrive at classifications that would make sense to a student of the Islamic sciences and to be consistent across English and Arabic entries, | but in a few cases there may be slight variance across these fields. Correspondence presented special problems that were solved, where the content was discernable from a title or by the annotator in the field, by grouping letters into three broad, not unambiguous rubrics: politics, economy and society. |
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