Bénédicte Savoy noted: “You have a huge collection of African books looted by the French in the 19th century in the Bibliothèque Nationale. But they are not in a department for African manuscripts because they are written in Arabic. It is African language but in Arabic letters. So in France, if you would go to the Bibliothèque Nationale, they would say, ‘No, we have no manuscript Africain. We have manuscript Arabe.’”
