Yeah, there is a similar situation with post-classical philosophy in the Islamic world in the East, like in Iran or Central Asia. Although there at least there is quite a few manuscripts that have been looked at to see roughly what the contents are, like the kind of table of contents, what are the sections about, how are they structured. Whereas with African manuscripts it seems like we haven't really even done that as a field yet. So there's a lot to discover here, obviously. Absolutely

right. And I would say that it is probably even more urgent in Africa for one reason. Africa has been for so long associated with orality. I mean, it is the world that comes to mind because the dominant discipline for the study of thought in Africa had been ethnography, anthropology. It is time to let that tradition of written evolution be known. So yes, it is really urgent to see that these manuscripts are

published and translated. Yes. We just mentioned that one of the major centers for intellectual activity, at least prior to the Moroccan invasion in 1591, was Timbuktu. And you've actually published a book or edited a book about Timbuktu and the intellectual traditions there. What sorts of scholarship were carried on in Timbuktu? And what was the institutional framework for that scholarship? I mean, were there schools, were there kind of small universities? Or how was it practically arranged?

Oh, yes, indeed. One might speak of universities. I mean, the San Kure Mosque is also referred to sometimes as the University of San Kure. Just because the university model that was created actually in the Islamic world, we have always to remember that the first university in the modern sense was as had in Egypt. But the model of what we call the university would be scholars teaching in mosques, coming at regular time, coming to their chair and delivering their lecture and taking questions from their disciples. So this was the model of teaching and learning in Timbuktu and in other places in the Bilad Sudan or West Africa. So from what we know, that was the case in Timbuktu as well. Ahmed Babak, who is probably the most known scholar of Timbuktu, who was captured after the invasion by the Moroccan army, refers to the teaching that he received from his own master. And fortunately, we don't have anything from that master. We just have the testimony of Ahmed Babak, who referred to him as really this color of his time, the moushedahid of his time, even which means the one who renewed somehow Islamic sciences. So he spoke very, very highly of his master. And from his testimony, we can see how learning was going there because I mentioned earlier all the books that he could borrow from him and the kind of teaching he received from him. Basically on the model of a master, a scholar sitting on his chair in a mosque, being surrounded by disciples, giving a lecture and taking questions from them. Ahmed Babak himself, actually, when he was taken to Morocco after the invasion of Timbuktu thought in Morocco, actually, according to the same kind of format, he would go to the mosque in Morocco and give lecture and take questions. And the story is that Moroccans were amazed by his knowledge because they thought of basically the place he was coming from the Sohrai Empire as the margins of the Islamic word and the Islamic intellectual centers. And they were discovering that actually Timbuktu was just another prominent Islamic center of knowledge

as all the kind of centers that you might find in the Islamic world in general.