Author
Louis Werner
Louis Werner is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City.
Articles by this author
Somaliland’s Midwife
Science & Nature
From the hospital that carries her name to the villages where she is affectionately greeted as Edo (Auntie), Edna Adan has helped Somaliland recover from a civil war and inspired a rising generation of women leaders in medicine, public service, environmental conservation and even the arts.
The Ottoman Carpets of Transylvania
Some of the finest carpets ever made came from Ottoman workshops in western Anatolia between the 16th and 19th centuries. One of the best collections of them can be found displayed and stored among more than a dozen churches in Transylvania.
Khartoum: A Tale of Two Rivers
History
Sudan’s capital Khartoum is the gift of not one but two Niles—the White and the Blue—at whose meeting point arose a three-part metropolis.
The Amazigh Adventures of Le Petit Prince
Arts & Culture
History
One of the world's most beloved children's stories, The Little Prince – as it is titled in English – resonates especially in Morocco among Amazigh, or Berber, children and not just for its familiar desert setting. As one translator explains, "The plot has many similarities to our Amazigh oral tales."
The Silent Silk Road Rendezvous of Konye Urgench
History
Abandoned for more than 300 years following its eclipse by competing cities, the remnants of a once-flourishing capital of a once-powerful Silk Roads realm remind us of centuries of craftsmanship and scholarship in one of Central Asia’s most intact historical sites.
Forest of Tides: The Sundarbans
Arts & Culture
Nourished from the north by three rivers from two nations and from the south by the Bay of Bengal, the world’s largest mangrove forest brings together not only rivers and sea, but also hundreds of plant and animal species as well as some 4 million people who live and work in and around the Sundarbans. Protected by both India and Bangladesh, the Sundarbans is listed as a UN World Heritage Site, its name meaning “beautiful forest” in Bengali. As populations and sea levels continue to rise, so too do the challenges.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part VI: The Double Lives of Ibn al-Khatib
History
Minister in the Nasrid court of Granada both before and after exile in Morocco, Ibn al-Khatib was a poet, a polymath and an insomniac whose writings earned him renown and a prominent inscription on a wall at the Alhambra.
Via Egnatia to Rome and Byzantium
History
Paved with stones that, according to one Roman writer, “give the appearance not simply of being laid together ... but they seem to have actually grown together,” the Via Egnatia joined East and West under empires both Roman and Ottoman. Much of its 1,100-kilometer length can still be walked and driven, from original-stone footpaths in Albania to a superhighway in Greece.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part V: Ibn Hazm’s Journeys of Exile and Love
History
Socially acerbic, survivor of 11th-century politics that drove him from three homes, Ibn Hazm wrote prolifically on many subjects, but he is remembered most of all for his bittersweet classic, Tawq al-Hamama, or The Ring of the Dove.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part IV: al-Ghazal: From Constantinople to the Land of the Vikings
History
Good looks and a fleet wit gave Al-Ghazal his name, which means “gazelle,” and in later years the poet and courtier of Córdoba proved a reluctant though dutiful envoy both east and, more notably, north.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part III: Ibn al-Shaykh and the Lighthouse of Alexandria
History
Architect and builder by profession, Ibn al-Shaykh of Málaga wrote the most accurate description known of Egypt’s famous mariner’s sentinel— in what was essentially a primer for children, where it went unnoticed for nearly 800 years.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part II: Abu Hamid Al-Garnati’s World of Wonders
History
Over his 90-year lifetime, this chronicler of fact and unabashed fancy trekked, sailed, caravanned, studied and traded from the far Arab West to the northern- and easternmost reaches of the 12th-century Islamic world.
Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part 1: The Travel Writer Ibn Jubayr
History
Arts & Culture
Our six-part series begins with a two-year pilgrimage by one of the great founders of the literary genre of rihla, or travelogue. Over later centuries, his style was widely emulated (and plagiarized), and today the rihla of Ibn Jubayr uniquely illuminates a 12th-century Mediterranean world of paradoxical complexity.