News أخبارنا

RICHARD HENRY This pierced stone screen at the mosque of Ibn Tulun, Cairo, produced in the ninth century CE, sets a biomorphic, leaf design at the center of each 12-pointed star. For our next journey into the art of Islamic patterns, we visit Marrakesh, Morocco, where we find a stunning carved stucco design on a wall in the Qasr al-Bahiyah. The design is framed within a niche topped by muqarnas, the characteristic stalactite-like forms that often articulate the transition from a wall to a dome, a vault or, as in this beautiful example, the upper span of an interior niche....

Romanticized by Hollywood and toyed with by European architects, Casablanca sprawls along the sea and gnaws steadily at its outskirts, much as other modern metro areas where growth seems to have all happened pretty much in the last century. Known colloquially by both Arabic speakers and others simply as “Casa,” it is a conglomeration of chaos and contradictions, heritage and kitsch; brutal and beautiful, unsettling and inviting, ephemeral and enduring. It is a merge lane for past, present and future that leads to a collision of Moroccan artisanship and European modernism. It’s also a city where 23-year-old author and architect...

While many academic librarians have experience with and have found success working with an approval plan to bring books into their libraries, others may find the concept intimidating.  How does it work?  Will I get the books students and researchers at my library need? Will an approval plan fit within my budget? Here we debunk five misconceptions about approval plans.

A fennec fox, the sand and stars, a baobab tree and a lad whose scarf unwinds to the length of a tagelmust, the face-covering turban worn by the nomads in the Sahara, are just some of the images that readers hold dear after finishing The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The reach of the beloved children’s classic—about a pilot who crash-lands in the world’s largest sand desert and meets a small boy from a far-off asteroid—is as vast as the Sahara itself. This year the story was translated for the 300th time since it was first published in French as Le Petit...