The city of Timbuktu became a major centre of Islamic learning in West Africa largely because of the establishment of

Timbuktu rose to prominence as an intellectual centre of the Islamic world primarily through the Sankore Mosque and the network of scholars associated with it, which functioned as an informal university. At its height during the Mali and Songhai empires, the city attracted thousands of students and housed hundreds of thousands of manuscripts covering theology, law, mathematics, and astronomy.