Stories

Malaysian hotelier Chris Ong has amassed an impressive Peranakan heritage collection of at least 10,000 artifacts.

This is how a Damascus dish became my Alabama family story, one generation at a time.

How did an instrument with West African ancestors, entwined with Americana music, appear in the lineup of a North African orchestra? Two parallel narratives hold the answer.

At the Venice Biennale, which runs through November 22, 2026, the Moroccan, French and Saudi national pavilions show how craft and shared memory can resist cultural erasure.

The legacy of an Ottoman-era project to connect Damascus, Syria, to the holy site of Madinah in modern Saudi Arabia and beyond is breathing new life into today’s vision for rail in the region.

With earthquakes, weather, tourism and time threatening some of the world's most celebrated Islamic architecture, restorers ensure that the knowledge behind the monuments survives alongside the buildings themselves.

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its independence from Great Britain on July 4, the foods that filled the tables of the Founding Fathers—the late-18th-century statesmen who were most influential in the new country’s creation—are a reminder that elite households relied on ingredients carried through trade routes connecting the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia and regions now known as the Middle East.

Chef and restaurateur Shane Delia re-creates a rice-and-milk pudding he discovered along Türkiye’s Black Sea coast, one of many sutlaç found on menus in the region; this recipe gets additional texture from a pistachio crumble.

In Islamesque Diana Darke argues that Europe’s most celebrated architecture, including the Palermo Cathedral in Sicily, owes its sophistication to cultural exchanges with forgotten Muslim craftsmen.

Moroccan Spanish journalist Leyla Hamed has built a career telling the human stories inside football, the world's largest sport.

The collaborative nature of World Cup songs reflects the global scale of the tournament itself.