Juma Al Majid Center for Culture and Heritage in Dubai, in cooperation with the Arab Organization for Administrative Development affiliated with the League of Arab States, presented a knowledge session entitled “Methods of Benefiting from International Conventions in Preserving Heritage”, in which Dr. Yasser Al-Hayaji, Assistant Professor of Heritage at the University of Beirut, participated. King Saud of Saudi Arabia, and Dr. Bassam Dagestani, Head of the Department of Conservation, Treatment and Restoration at the Juma Al Majid Center.
The session began with Dr. Yasser Al-Hayaji, who spoke in his paper, which he called “Protection of Cultural Heritage in an International Context Multiple Risks and Criteria”, about the protection of cultural heritage at the international level, the risks it is exposed to, and the criteria for its protection, where he shed light on the concept and forms of protecting cultural heritage, reviewing The most important international organizations and conventions for the protection of cultural heritage, according to their chronological order. He also talked about the obstacles to protecting heritage in the international context, and the obstacles that organizations concerned with protecting heritage face in order to achieve their goals.
Then Dr. Bassam Dagestani talked about the role of the Juma Al Majid Center in preserving the heritage of West Africa, and reviewed the work of the center in the city of Chit, Mauritania, and how the center helped establish a manuscript restoration laboratory there, then he talked about the state of Mali and the role that the center played in preserving the heritage of Timbuktu manuscripts from loss. which it was subjected to after the military coup in Mali in 2012, when the center assisted those responsible for those manuscripts in transporting them to the capital, Bamako, which was safe at that time, and the center signed a cooperation agreement with international institutions concerned with preserving heritage, which resulted in the opening of the largest digital imaging laboratory for manuscripts in West Africa in order to photograph all the Timbuktu manuscripts.
