Al-BAB

"He who goes in quest of aid" Al-Mu'tasim is the name of the eighth Abassid ruler who was victorious in eight battle...

Today, Western style skyscrapers have spread to the desert of the Gulf and the Pacific coast of China. Once upon a time, Arabic-...

A unique and little known community that flies below the radar of most tourist itineraries can be found east of Amman, along Jordan’s de...

The Denver Post recently published a handful of interesting photos from Afghanistan in the 1960s. The images were taken by an American t...

“In my judgment certainly, nothing at all dies in this sensible world... for if any part of it is released from one conjunction, it do...

We don't often refer to specific articles; however, a recent one by Roger Cohen in the New York Times is very much in the spirit of...

We have added a new section to the sidebar of this blog, titled 'Books on Human Development'. It's a list of a dozen works tha...

(Mughal miniature circa 1600) " If you want to understand this region, just take out a map from the Ganges to the Nile and remo...

"All colour is abominable" The following is the first in a series of posts highlighting the writing of the great 20th centu...

Several years ago, while doing research for a project on 20th century Egyptian photographers, I paid a visit to Studio Kerop - the last o...

A vibrant collection of photos in  The Atlantic Monthly  presents the richness and contradictions of Iran and its people today.  The ...

“A Zen master remarked: ‘Renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, it is accepting that they go away.’ The result o...

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...