Arabic: Did you mean...?

Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan al-Fasi al-Granati, 1485-1554) was a diplomat, merchant traveller and scholar who famously voyaged from Timbuktu to the Niger River and wrote 'The Description of Africa' (La Descrittione...

Over a thousand years old, this Arabic inscription was found in Wadi Musa, just outside of Petra. This limestone block was a tombstone dedicated to the memory of an important man then, Abu al-Husayn ibn Abdullah, who died in 787 CE. The inscription...

The Arabs invaded and conquered Persian and Byzantine Armenia in 630s and 640s CE, respectively. At Garni Temple, there is Arabic graffiti along the walls, which is dated to the 9th-10th centuries CE.

A medallion with the phrase "Allah Jalla Jalaluhu" ("May His glory be glorified"), in Arabic calligraphy. The medallion was installed in the Hagia Sophia between 1847 and 1849 CE when the building was restored by Ottoman sultan Abdulmejid...

The Quran (also written Qur’an or Koran), revealed in the 7th century, is the sacred book of Islam, following in the tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, with the Torah as the sacred book of Judaism and the New Testament as the sacred book...

The Description of Africa is the first comprehensive book about Africa, written by Leo Africanus, an African scholar trained in the Islamic intellectual tradition, in 1526, during the Italian Renaissance. A skillful mixture of anthropology...

Freya Stark (l. 1893-1993) was an English explorer, writer, and political influencer who chronicled world events, especially in the Near East, throughout the 20th century. Stark both reported on and made the news as her travels, described...

Caliphate (“Khilafat” in Arabic) was a semi-religious political system of governance in Islam, in which the territories of the Islamic empire in the Middle East and North Africa and the people within were ruled by a supreme leader called...

Fatima Al-Fihri (c. 800-880) was a Muslim woman, scholar and philanthropist who is credited with founding the world’s oldest, continuously running university during the 9th century: the University of Al-Qarawiyyin, located in Fez in Morocco...

The spices clove, nutmeg, and mace originated on only a handful of tiny islands in the Indonesian archipelago but came to have a dramatic, far-reaching impact on world trade. In antiquity, they became popular in the medicines of India and...