Bringing together nearly 400 participants from 34 countries, this symposium, the first at the African and international level, aims to discover the African Islamic heritage, its components, its stages of development, the contributions of different milieus, its outstanding figures, including scholars, Ulema and Sufis, as well as its strength of creativity and its mechanisms of communication and intercultural exchange.

The meeting, which runs until October 31, also aims at the preservation of African Islamic manuscripts in particular, through the identification of their nature, their centers, problems and dangers that threaten them and ways to promote them and preserve them from deterioration and loss.

In addition, the conference is meant to establish scientific mechanisms for discovering, cataloguing, disseminating and preserving manuscripts, through using modern technologies, as well as restoring damaged ones, digitizing them and making them available to researchers.