A decade ago, Nadine Toukan led Jordan’s Royal Film Commission and founded a workshop that launched a generation of  Arab and especially Jordanian filmmakers. Often credited on screen as a producer, she likes to think of herself as “a connector.”

What do you do after you discover a dinosaur that swam, clawed and chomped its way to the top of the Cretaceous food chain? Paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim wants to display it where he found it—in Morocco. 

Strategic and even glamorous at times over 196 years, the American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, is today a neighborhood cultural center where young and old improve reading and writing and learn new skills.

Born in a refugee camp in Kenya, 19-year-old Somali-American designer Sahro Hassan has won awards as well as acclaim in her hometown of Lewiston, Maine, for “modest fashion” that can appeal to Muslim and non-Muslim women alike. 

A decade after Kazakhstan completed a dam, fish are returning to the northern reaches of the inland sea that became a global icon of environmental collapse. 

Socially acerbic, survivor of 11th-century politics that drove him from three homes, Ibn Hazm wrote prolifically on many subjects, but he is remembered most of all for his bittersweet classic, Tawq al-Hamama, or The Ring of the Dove.