(RNS) — In a former segregated school in rural Virginia, an Islamic college has been reconnecting its mostly African American Muslim students with a legacy of faith and scholarship largely erased from mainstream history.

IQOU Theological College, in the town of Charlotte Court House, for the past two years has housed a small, borrowed collection of ancient manuscripts from the West African city of Timbuktu in Mali, a center of Islamic learning that thrived between the 13th and 17th centuries. It’s also a region where many Africans were kidnapped during the transatlantic slave trade.

Hafiz Hassan Ali Qadri, a Quran teacher at the college, said the 17 manuscripts can offer African American Muslims a concrete link to a part of their ancestors’ history.…