Background Information

---

My name is Aamir Haris, which means civilized protector. I was raised in a mudbrick house in Timbuktu, where I had two siblings. I was born a Muslim and still am to this day, like many others here in Timbuktu. I was not wealthy when I was young, and we had a tough time getting food on the table. My father was a merchant not having much luck in the trade until a friend told him about the potential in the salt trade. Because of the heavy use and trade of gold, Timbuktu was nicknamed African el Dorado, the city of gold. Salt was roughly equivalent to gold here in Timbuktu. With this knowledge, my father connected the dots for success. He got in this at the ground floor, and became the merchant to go to for buying and selling gold and salt. This was a huge turning point in my life, because our family got to live in luxury for the first time ever. Remembering the feeling of wealth is something I wanted to bring to my kids, which is why I wanted to become a merchant like my dad. It’s hard to not find a mosque every other street, as the majority of people from Timbuktu are Muslim. A big part of being Muslim is reading the Quran, so literacy rates were very high. Another huge player in literacy rates is the abundance of universities and scholars. It was a huge center for education at this time, arguably the biggest in the world at the time. I have big shoes to fill, trying to do what my father did so well. Often I try to give my kids the luxury of walking around the city, looking at the protruding logs of the mosques, and the mud brick houses that line each street, as I never got to do that. When my kids started to grow up, I sent them to Sidi Yahya, one of Timbuktu’s three main madrasahs. I wish for them to become some of the world’s greatest Islamic scholars one day.

---