Author
Ken Chitwood
Ken Chitwood, Ph.D., is an award-winning writer on religion, travel and culture. He is currently a Fritz Thyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Re- search Fellow at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies of Freie Universität Berlin. He is also a journalist-fellow with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s Spiritual Exemplars Project, and he lectures in Islamic science at Otto Friedrich Universität Bamberg.
Articles by this author
Gotha's Library of Forgotten Islamic Wonders
History
With origins from Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, the Gotha Research Library features more than 1 million objects and manuscripts—including 800 years of Islamicate scholarship and the collection of 19th-century German physician Ulrich Jasper Seetzen.
Andrew Nemr Taps Into Story
Arts & Culture
Telling stories about life journeys may not be what most people think tap dancers do, but that is where Andrew Nemr taps his way into a deeper root of the art.
“Prince of Casablanca”
Arts & Culture
Working with civic reality as an architect and personal imagination as a novelist, Alaa Halifi has, at age 23, already won awards in both fields. His subject: his city, Casablanca.
Berlin’s Transcultural Jam
Arts & Culture
People
A musical wave has been swelling for a decade in the German capital, which one local analyst now calls “the city of choice for a new generation of cultural talent from the Middle East and North Africa”—part of the greater demographic shift that has made people of Arab backgrounds Berlin’s fourth-largest ethnic-identity group. In street jams, clubs, studios, concert halls and online, new mixes of musicians are blending notes and ideas into genre-bending, transcultural fusions. “What we as artists in Berlin can do is tear down the borders in our head and invite others to do the same,” says musician Jamila Al-Yousef.
Streaming Ramadan TV to the World
Arts & Culture
New platforms, new stories and more subtitles are making the comedies, thrillers, biopics and dramas of what has long been TV’s peak season in Muslim majority countries into a year-round, binge-ready global window on popular cultures.
The Liverpool Effect
History
Around the turn of the 20th century, an acrobat from Morocco named Achmed Ben Ibrahim settled near the thriving port of Liverpool, UK. Forgotten until the recent discovery of his 1906 tombstone, his story foreshadows the cultural impacts of the city’s most famous 21st-century resident—Egyptian soccer star Mohammed “Mo” Salah.
The World’s First Oils
History
Science & Nature
Pressed, extracted or distilled from any of hundreds of plants, pure “essential” oils are not just a rising multibillion-dollar global industry: They are among the world’s oldest organic wellness products, now available almost everywhere.