Asma Khan introduced her blend of South Asian food to England in 2017 when she founded the Darjeerling Express, a brick-and-mortar restaurant in London that started off as a supper club.

Although now one of the most acclaimed writers in the Arabic world, Ibrahim al-Koni spent his earliest years completely immersed in the language and stories of Tuareg oral culture-a historically nomadic Berber tribe in northwest Libya.

It wasn’t until he found himself thousands of kilometers from his native Australia in September 2001 that Coller, a UCLA-Irvine professor of history, began to realize that his seemingly disparate early interests in French culture, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, his longing to understand the Middle East and his determination to speak Arabic were all parts of his innate fascination with people. 

It was time for the family to sit down for dinner at Nawal Nasrallah’s home in Bloomington, Indiana. Nasrallah had made her 18-year-old daughter Iba’s favorite dish, Iraqi-style eggplant biryani, in honor of the college acceptance letter Iba had just received. Iba spooned the biryani onto her plate, took a bite and burst into tears. “Where am I going to find food like this at school?” she asked.

Photojournalist Tor Eigeland set sail from his hometown of Oslo in 1947 at age 16, and he never looked back until he had completed his last photography assignment, in Tangier for AramcoWorld in 2016.

“What does it mean to develop a complex sense of Arab American identity in film?” asks Waleed F. Mahdi, whose comparative and detailed analysis of three motion picture industries—Hollywood, Egyptian and Arab American—searches for an answer to that question.

Acclaimed cookbook author Salma Hage grew up in the mountains of the Kadisha Valley in Northern Lebanon. Like many cooks, she learned her craft at her mother’s knee, as well as those of other female relatives in her household, where she often took on the role of cook for her eleven siblings. Her most recent book, Middle Eastern Sweets, pays homage to the many sweet endings to traditional family meals plus the rich multicultural influences that have defined Lebanon and the region for centuries. 

International travel in 2020 went from a luxury enjoyed by some to an impossibility endured by all. British travel writer and journalist Matthew Teller witnessed his livelihood become grounded more abruptly than most.

With its rose windows and soaring, pointed arches, Gothic architecture is a crowning achievement of medieval Western Christendom but not, writes Oxford-educated Arabist Diana Darke, an independently developed one.