Kerning Cultures

Faysal Bibi and his team of palaeontologists have been captivated by this one particular moment that took place in the Abu Dhabi desert seven million years ago. This week, a journe…

Ronnie Chatah started giving his walking tours of Beirut in 2008, during a period of stability for the city. He would guide tourists through the city, telling stories of Phoenician…

In 1968, a trio of Palestinian filmmakers began making films about life under Israeli occupation. Almost 15 years and over 90 films later, their film unit became a dominant force i…

In October 1960, the walls were closing in for Patrice Lumumba. Months earlier, he had been celebrated as the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister after decades of b…

After their employer abandoned the vessel they was working on, Vikash Mishra and his crew spent nearly three years stuck on a slowly sinking ship off the coast of the UAE. This wee…

Because of what's happening in Palestine this week, we're holding off airing our usual programming. Instead we're going to re-air one of our favourite episodes from last season: Je…

When seafarer Mehmet Gulsen stepped on board the Kenan Mete, he thought he was signing up to a pretty standard 7 month contract, and then he'd be home in Ukraine with his young dau…

Loving Lebanon is one thing; living there is another. Generation after generation, surviving in the homeland sometimes costs too much.This essay was written and read by Zahra Hanki…

Two stories of music getting lost… and then found again. A record producer unearths a Moroccan masterpiece in the back of a dusty electronics shop in Casablanca, sending him on a l…

In 1942, Lebanon's National Museum opened in Beirut, celebrating the country's golden age, and inside, it housed some of the region's most important artifacts. So when the Lebanese…

Nagi Daifallah was a young farm worker from Yemen who moved to California in the early 1970s, when he was just 20 years old. He went on to become one of the organisers of the influ…

Over the last half century, as many nations around our region have gained independence or been through regime change, they've have had to ask themselves big questions. Like, what m…

The graceful courtyards of Mexico and Puerto Rico aren't the first places you'd go looking for a secret Islamic history. But a closer look at the tiles and teacups reveals a bloody…

What happens when somebody dies in a country that's not their home? In the UAE, the answer to that is complicated. This week on Kerning Cultures, stories about the families who've…

In 2015, our producer Nadeen Shaker visited the Cairo Genizah in one of Egypt's oldest synagogues. It was the place where, thousands of years ago, the Jews of Egypt literally store…

On August 2nd 1990, the Iraqi military invaded Kuwait City overnight, and its residents woke up to a city under occupation. The only airport was put on lockdown, and the Iraqi mili…

Ahmed Twaij explores an often-overlooked issue in the Arab world; racism towards Black Arabs. In this episode, he looks at racism in his own community, taking us from his Iraqi roo…

As 2020 brought us countless examples of injustice and pain, it brought remembrances that we live in a world in need of more - well, work. And that means scrutinising the cities we…

After the Armenian Genocide, in which over 1.5 million Christians from the Ottoman Empire were killed by the Ottoman government, the main group of Ottoman leaders behind the atroci…

Since 2012, Korean pop culture has captured the imagination of people across the Middle East: from K-pop and K-dramas to Korean language classes and even to Korean fried chicken. I…