Al-BAB

A hakawati is a storyteller in Arabic, and also the title of a book by Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American writer. This weave of storie...

Most people in the West have heard of the poets Omar Khayyam and Jalaludin Rumi. Khayyam came to Western fame through a (poor) 19th centu...

For over a decade, Lebanese architect Mona el-Hallak has waged a single-handed campaign to turn a war-ravaged belle epoch building in Be...

Western civilization will often point to the intellectual advances of the ancient Greeks and Romans as the cornerstone of its own scienti...

A few hours drive north of Beirut lies a collection rugged of valleys and gorges running down from Lebanon’s high alpine range. This spe...

The Kasidah is a poem written by the 19th century British adventurer and writer, Richard Francis Burton, under the pseud...

Everyone knows that the origins of agriculture and civilization are in the Middle East. In the back of our minds are Egypt and the Ni...

Aficionados of Middle Eastern politics and anyone who's kept a close eye on Egypt's revolution (and its aftermath) is likely fami...

If you ask people familiar with the Middle East to list the towns with the best souqs, bazaars, and old medieval quarters, you’d find yo...

Yasser Arafat takes to the dance floor amid his cronies in Beirut prior to the Israeli invasion in 1982.

All over the world today, Christians will mark the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He was a man and a prophet who grew up in the Middle East, ...

"From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan, to Qutuz the Mamluk, who fled to escape our swords: Y ou should think of...

Ahmed Muhiddin Piri Re’is (1475-1544) was an Ottoman mariner and mapmaker whose rise to prominence paralleled the ascending fortunes of the ...

Legend has it that a young man grew up in the city of Byblos, and became so handsome and prominent that he was called "Adon" (or ...

For every Mandaean living in Iraq today, there were twelve living there in 2003. What was once a population of 60,000 has dwindled to 5,000 ...