Kushari is a simple, yet hearty vegetarian dish that is popular on the streets of Egypt. It is often considered poor man’s food because it is cheap and filling.

Independent. Confident. Inclusive. Three watchwords for art collector and social-media activist Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, whose Barjeel Foundation is showing how much Arab modern art has to say.

How does art influence our attitudes toward the cultures artists come from and express? To find out, we looked at a children’s museum, a public mural, an online comedy and a touring hip-hop quartet.

“If you imagine French cuisine as a tree,” says food historian Emmanuel Perrodin, “the leaves are in Paris, but the roots reside in Marseille”—fed by 2,600 years of migrations from the Mediterranean and beyond.

Sudan’s capital Khartoum is the gift of not one but two Niles—the White and the Blue—at whose meeting point arose a three-part metropolis.

He wrote the first book in English by an author of Indian origin and opened London’s first Indian restaurant, but he is remembered most along England’s south coast for his therapeutic steam baths.

It was as if Dubai's sand "reflected ... not the forms of the towers but the humanity that built them," says photographer Bjorn Moerman.