In October, Ms. Diakité and Mr. Haidara signed a 100,000-euro contract with a Dutch foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, to transport 200 more lockers of privately owned manuscripts south. This shipment contained roughly half of the 160,000 that still needed to be removed from Timbuktu, the Dutch were told. More money was raised from the Ford Foundation, the Al Majid center in Dubai, the German foreign ministry and a second Dutch charity, DOEN. Toward the end of the 2012, staff members at the German Embassy in Bamako were told that between 80,000 and 120,000 manuscripts had been moved south.

By early 2013, however, the Malian crisis was approaching a denouement. In January, the jihadists began to push south, and President François Hollande of France responded by ordering a military intervention. Under a French air assault, the Malian rebels were soon forced to retreat. Ms. Diakité and Mr. Haidara began a new fund-raising round among the European embassies in Bamako. The threat to the collections was extreme, diplomats were told: The French action had angered the occupiers of Timbuktu, who had ordered that the city’s manuscripts be gathered together on Jan. 24, the day of the festival of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, to be burned.

The Dutch foreign trade minister, Lilianne Ploumen, was persuaded, and approved a new donation of 323,475 euros for the evacuation of 136,000 manuscripts. The overall cost of the private evacuation was approaching $1 million.

The renewed fighting in the north meant the land route from Timbuktu was now too dangerous; instead, Mr. Haidara and Ms. Diakité told their donors, the couriers would use the Niger. Ms. Diakité later related dramatic stories about how great fleets of boats carried the lockers upstream. At one point, 20 were hijacked by bandits, but Mr. Haidara calmly ransomed them. On another occasion, French military helicopters threatened to sink the manuscript boats until the couriers waved their documents, at which point the pilots “saluted and pulled away.” When the manuscripts reached Djenné, about 300 miles southwest of Timbuktu, they were loaded onto a hundred bush taxis for the final 350 miles to Bamako by road.

On Jan. 28, Timbuktu was liberated by French and Malian forces. According to Mr. Haidara, the private evacuation had moved 377,491 manuscripts in almost 2,500 lockers, which represented more than 95 percent of the Timbuktu manuscripts. It was an extraordinary story — too extraordinary for some among the small cadre of international academics who had actually worked with the manuscripts.

For Bruce Hall, a professor at Duke University who lived in Timbuktu for several years while conducting research, the giant claims being made about the evacuation of the private libraries were red flags. In his view, 300,000 was a best guess for the total number of Arabic manuscripts that existed in the whole of northern Mali. How could Mr. Haidara claim to have moved almost 400,000?

There were other problems with the Haidara-Diakité narrative. One was that many of Timbuktu’s more famous collections never left the city. The claim that the jihadists had threatened to burn all the documents during the festival of the Prophet’s birthday also seemed shaky; no one I interviewed in Timbuktu recalled this moment. The grand imam, Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti, who led negotiations with the jihadist leadership over the festival, said simply, “They did not threaten to burn the manuscripts of Timbuktu.”