George Azar

Except for a rare self-portrait, Bibi Zogbé painted flowers—exuberant and confident, as well as modern and symbolic, her paintings reflect her life between her native Lebanon and three decades in Argentina.

In the mid-1980s, Sadika Keskes fired up the first artisanal glass furnaces in Tunisia in 600 years. Since then she has revived a once-thriving heritage craft and, through her teaching, lit up imaginations among a new generation of artisans.

“I’ve tried to listen and understand,” said the late Anthony Shadid, the first Arab American correspondent to win a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. How he did it was no secret formula: time; attention; sincerity—and lots of notes.

Perched on a table-topped, naturally defensive crag overlooking green valleys in Iraq’s rugged north, the town of Amedi is one of what were once nearly 200 historic citadels and one of the most intact. Experts at home and abroad are pitching in to meet the town’s newest challenge: preserving the history that remains and, at the same time, turning it into a much-needed economic engine.

Tuned to low-impact design, local materials and how people physically experience buildings, the Royal Academy for Conservation of Nature in northern Jordan rises from an abandoned limestone quarry to exemplify the ethic it teaches.

Once a traditional Arab headdress of white cotton sewn with traditional patterns in black or red, the kufiya is being pulled by designers onto the streets and runways of global fashion.