By the grace and will of God, I have approached the middle of my eighth decade of life. I often recall moments, scenes, and people who brought me happiness, and I record some of them here.
I remember the first apple my eyes ever saw—it was large, with a bright, glossy red color. I was three years old at the time, in 1945. I was
“What is Iran today?” With this deceptively simple question, the late President Anwar Sadat offered one of the earliest and most prescient readings of post-revolutionary Iran—not as a state that merely changed its political system, but as one that entered a fundamentally different trajectory.
President Anwar
Sheikh Salem bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Commerce and Tourism Development Authority (SCTDA), crowned international football legends Alessandro Florenzi, former Roma defender and Italy national team player, and Fernando Llorente, former Athletic Bilbao, Tottenham striker, and Spain national team player, as champions of the
At six o’clock on Friday evening, January 9, 2026, a new virtual session will convene as part of the Creative Encounters on the Silk Road series, opening the new year with an open dialogue on children’s and young adult literature—one of the literary fields most deeply connected to shaping awareness and nurturing imagination.
The year 2025 was rich in movement, travel, and multi-directional cultural work—a year in which geography intersected with creativity, and personal experience converged with public cultural action, grounded in a firm belief in the role of the word, art, and knowledge in building bridges among peoples.
Major Journeys of the Year:
