Considers the fragility of Arab and Islamicate cultural memory when records, objects and stories are dispersed, endangered, inaccessible or lost. It explores how cultural memory is collected, interpreted and kept meaningful across institutional and community contexts, while asking what preservation can support without replacing living custodianship, historical context or cultural authority.
Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi
Emirati columnist, researcher and collector; founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah (2010), which holds and lends one of the most significant collections of modern Arab art. He has taught courses on the politics of modern Arab art and on Gulf cities at universities in the United States and the UAE.
Dr. Walid Ghali
Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Head Librarian at Aga Khan University; Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Stéphane Ipert
Stéphane Ipert directs the Heritage Library at Qatar National Library, which holds rare books, manuscripts, maps and archival collections related to Qatar and the Islamic world and has served since 2015 as the IFLA Preservation and Conservation Centre for the Arab Region and the Middle East. An art historian, conservator and lawyer by training, with a focus on legal issues concerning art and heritage, he has led since 2020 the Himaya Project, an international programme to counter the trafficking of oriental manuscripts and documentary heritage. He has published books and papers on heritage preservation, the literary arts of the Islamic world and the legal protection of documentary heritage.
Dr. Ali Diakité
Ali Diakite is a historian specializing in the intellectual and social history of nineteenth-century West Africa. He holds an MA from the Université de Bamako, as well as an MA and a PhD from the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon. He currently serves as a Cataloger of West African Manuscripts at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), Saint John’s University, Minnesota. He is the co-author of The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tārīkh Ibn Al-Mukhtār of the Songhay Empire and the Tārīkh Al-Fattāsh of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi, published by the British Academy in 2025. His current research includes a book project on the nineteenth-century Macina scholar al-Mukhtār ibn Yerkoy Talfi. He is also co-authoring an article entitled Digitizing Timbuktu: Global Access and Local Heritage, which explores the digitization of Timbuktu’s manuscript heritage and questions of global access and local cultural preservation.