With origins from Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, the Gotha Research Library features more than 1 million objects and manuscripts—including 800 years of Islamicate scholarship and the collection of 19th-century German physician Ulrich Jasper Seetzen.

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.

During the hot summer months, ice-cream shops, called shir yakh feroshees, would sell an assortment of ice creams and other cold desserts. My sister Fatema remembers going into beautiful little shops after school to buy shir yakh. They were colorful and decoratively tiled and had Bollywood music playing in the background. The shir yakh, with rose and pistachios, is a favorite at Parwana, one of her restaurants.

This photo was taken off Ambon Island, East Indonesia in 2010. It is one of my favorites, illustrating the free-spirited nature of the children in the rural archipelago. While some children in the big cities may stay inside and play computer games, the children in Ambon with easy access to the water see the ocean surrounding their village as their playground.

Stimulated most recently by nutrition studies and marketing, pistachios are more available worldwide than ever. But today’s efforts are possible only thanks to patient bioengineering some 3,000 years ago.

For more than 10 years, Moroccan native and New York resident Hatim Belyamani has focused his non-profit Remix⟷Culture on offering digital sample and remix tools that give exposure and preserve access for traditional acoustic music around the world.

He was just a British kid looking for something to read one lazy summer day in 1950s Paris when images of the Sahara’s vast expanse on a magazine cover grabbed his attention. The story, about the fossils that had then just been discovered in the Sahara’s valleys, fascinated him. “I thought, I’m going to go and see those for myself one day,” Williams recalls.