Editorial

56 English Words With Arabic Roots: Art, Colour, Fabric and Architecture

Azure lost a letter, alcohol was once eye make-up, and a sofa was a carpeted platform. A field guide to the art words English borrowed from Arabic — and how sure we can be about each one.

Your sofa, your cotton shirt and the sequins on a party dress all have Arabic roots. We checked 56 English words from the world of art — colour, cloth, architecture and the studio — against two major dictionaries to trace where each came from, which languages carried it, and which famous etymologies are still disputed.

Marrakech · Morocco

Gladiator and Game of Thrones: Inside Aït Benhaddou

The earthen ksar that has played Rome, Jerusalem and Yunkai survives only because people keep rebuilding it. What cinema films as eternity is, wall by wall, a work of constant repair.

Aït Benhaddou is cinema's favourite image of the ancient past, from Gladiator to Game of Thrones. But its earthen walls last only as long as someone keeps repairing them, so the set for eternity is the freshest mud in Morocco.

Istanbul · Turkey

Nasreddin: The Trickster Everyone Claims

A padlocked gate with no walls, two rival graves, and stories told among two dozen peoples: how the wise fool of the Islamic world became a shape every culture fills with itself.

In Akşehir, a tomb said to hold Nasreddin Hodja stands in an open pavilion behind a heavy padlocked gate — with no wall on either side. It is the perfect monument to a man who may not be in it. The stories told under his name belong to more than one tradition and more than one century: Turkish, Persian, Arab, Central Asian, Uyghur. Reformist satirists, Soviet novelists, Chinese animators and UNESCO have each tried to give him a fixed home.

Baghdad · Iraq

One Thousand and One Nights as a Visual Network

The book that taught Europe to picture the East arrived with no pictures at all. Three centuries of illustrators — Dutch, Egyptian, Persian, French, German, Iraqi — each gave it a face, and every face was a self-portrait.

Open Galland's Thousand and One Nights, the edition that conquered Europe, and there is nothing to look at: no genie, no lamp, not one illustration. The most visually imagined book in the world began blind — and because its text was never fixed either, no picture of it could ever be a copy.

Tunis · Tunisia

Why Every Sci-Fi Desert Looks Arab

From Arrakis to Tatooine, when a film wants a desert to feel ancient, prophetic and alien, it reaches for an Arab and Berber vocabulary — and reveals more about the West that built it than the region it borrows from.

The wrapped faces, the trilling women, the barely-displaced Arabic: cinema's alien deserts keep sounding Arab. But the vocabulary was assembled in the West — from Orientalist painting to Lawrence to Dune — and it says more about who is looking than about anyone being looked at.

Cairo · Egypt

The Museum of Everything That Became a Tomb

Egypt built a museum to tell the story of an entire civilisation — seven thousand years of it, from flint tools to the present. The public knows it for one thing: the room where twenty dead kings lie in the dark.

In a black, hushed hall beneath the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Old Cairo lie the mummified bodies of Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, and eighteen other rulers of the New Kingdom — carried here in 2021 in a televised parade watched around the world.

Dubai · United Arab Emirates

The Flower That Was Never Only Beautiful

The rose rules Persian poetry and painting — but under the sweetness sits a thorn, a bleeding bird, and a national emblem quietly assembled out of Chinese, European and Persian parts. A history of gol o bolbol, from a medieval still to a Dubai gallery.

Gol o bolbol — the rose and the nightingale — is among the most beautiful images in a thousand years of Persian art, and in modern Persian it also means sweet, empty talk. Under the tile, the picture is darker: a bird singing in blood for a flower that will not answer and will not last.

Amman · Jordan

Why Wadi Rum Keeps Playing Mars: A Desert That Is Right About the Wrong Planet

A valley in southern Jordan has become cinema's favourite Mars — not because it is like the planet, but because it looks like the one we carry in our heads.

Put Wadi Rum beside a rover photograph and you can't tell which is Mars. But the desert shares almost nothing with the real planet except its colour — and lately, the illusion has grown powerful enough that real space missions have come to Jordan to rehearse.

Baghdad · Iraq

Where Is Agrabah? The City Disney Assembled From Real Places

Agrabah was going to be Baghdad. A war made it fictional — and then Disney built it back out of real places, from a tomb in Agra to a valley in Jordan that usually plays Mars.

The Sultan's palace where Princess Jasmine feels trapped has the silhouette of the Taj Mahal — which is not a palace at all, but a tomb. That is how Agrabah works. Disney's fairy-tale city was going to be Baghdad, until the Gulf War made the name impossible; the studio invented a place that could not be found on a map, then quietly rebuilt it out of real ones — Isfahan and Agra, Marrakesh and Mandalay, a Jordanian desert that has played both Arabia and Mars.

Why Old Sana'a Builds Upward

The tower houses of Old Sana'a rise five to nine storeys of stone and mud — and the usual reasons, defence and lack of space, are both too small.

In one of the oldest cities on earth, families live stacked from the animals on the ground floor to the poetry room at the top, in mud towers nine storeys high. Why Sana'a built vertically has half a dozen answers, heat least of all — and the system that raised the towers is the same one now dissolving them.

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon

The moon has been the measure of a beautiful face in Arabic verse for fifteen centuries — but beauty was only one of the things that light was ever asked to carry. A history of one disc, from a pre-Islamic ode to a glowing sphere over an Abu Dhabi harbour.

Ya qamar — you moon — is the oldest compliment in Arabic, and almost nothing about it means what we assume. The moon it praised was not always a woman, not always even a kindness, and in the end not only about beauty at all.

Cairo · Egypt

The House Whose Famous Guests All Moved Out

When Tutankhamun's mask left Cairo's Egyptian Museum for the Grand Egyptian Museum, it took the crowds with it — but not the collection. What remains in the old building on Tahrir Square turns out to be a stranger and more interesting museum than the one that emptied.

For most of a century, the golden mask of Tutankhamun stood behind glass on the upper floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In October 2025 it was driven out to Giza, and it was not the only thing to go: the royal mummies, the whole Tutankhamun collection, tens of thousands of objects have left the old museum for Egypt's gleaming new institutions.