In the Yoyogi district of Tokyo, Japan, stands the ornate Camii Mosque, in a location where there is a blend of cultures—educating locals and creating a harmony among traditions. Islam’s history in Japan is almost entirely recent, with estimates putting the number of Muslims in Japan close to 200,000 amid a national population of 125 million. “The point is to help people acquire the power of interpretation, the intellectual muscles of critical thinking and critical understanding of this world,” says Qayyim Naoki Yamamoto, professor of Islamic studies at Marmara University.

Visits to Spain in 1922 and 1936 led Dutch artist M.C. Escher to discover the world of designs in Granada’s 13th-century Alhambra palace, where interlocking patterns in tiles and stucco on its walls and ceilings became springboards to ideas that shaped his art for the rest of his life.

Avoiding main roads due to threats to his life, in 622 CE the Prophet Muhammad and his followers escaped north from Makkah to Madinah by riding through the rugged western Arabian Peninsula along path whose precise contours have been traced only recently. Known as the Hijrah, or migration, their eight-day journey became the beginning of the Islamic calendar, and this spring, the exhibition "Hijrah: In the Footsteps of the Prophet," at Ithra in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, explored the journey itself and its memories-as-story to expand understandings of what the Hijrah has meant both for Muslims and the rest of a the world. "This is a story that addresses universal human themes," says co-curator Idries Trevathan.

Amidst "the stillness of a world that never knew an engine... he found at last a life he longed to know and share.

Until the 1990s, the reed marshes of Iraq were Eurasia's most extensive wetlands, with a unique ecology that supported the Marsh Arabs' distinctive way of life. Then the marshes were drained and the people scattered. Azzam of Alwash, the emigré son of an Iraqi hydrologist, now works with international aid groups and Iraqi authorities to restore the desiccated marshlands. Reeds are sprouting, birds and fish are returning-and so are people. "A 7000-year-old culture doesn't die in a decade, he says.

In late 1967, photographer Tor Eigoland traveled for more than: a month, mostly by canoe, among the countless villages of southern Iraq's vast marshes. Now, 45 years later, writer Anthony Sattin calls his photographs a "rare and ethnographic record of a lost world. They bring us back to a time and place where people lived in harmony with their environment and respected the balance the natural world needs to thrive.'

The Nile river has been used as motif, a metaphor or both in popular culture, most prolifically in music in the United States for more than 125 years. The most notable uses of the Nile arose during the jazz period, which peaked in the second half of the 20th century and continues to this day.

Using as its base either calico or other stiff cotton cloth, the kummah is a link to the region's past as well as a personal statement for the present.

To Thesiger, life among the Marsh Arabs today would still be familiar. But to a man passionately opposed to what is called progress, it would also come as a dreadful shock—as Michael Spencer suggests in this article written after his first visit to the Marshes last year.