Being a crucial partner in IRCICA activities in Central Asia, Uzbekistan represents a crucial example in terms of the peaceful coexistence of various ethnicities and nationalities under the rubric of a truly multinational and multi-faith society. Hosting some of the greatest cultural and civilizational centers in the Islamic world, such as Bukhara and Samarqand, Uzbekistan is home to more than 130 ethnicities and nationalities.

Mark Donfried, founder and director general of the Berlin-based Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD), is not surprised at the comparatively low level of knowledge in the US about the Arab world, as revealed in a recent YouGov/Arab News survey. “Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans don’t have passports and so don’t go abroad. Most of the ones who do go to Canada and Mexico, some to Europe, but few of them make it to the Middle East,” he said.

U.S. museum visitors, who may not be intimately familiar with the Arab world and its gender dynamics, stand to gain a new understanding from viewing works by Arab women artists. The same would go for works by artists in any region that viewers don't know well. But there is a particular need within the Arab world for outsiders to see "beyond news headlines and night-vision photographs," says Sarah Hassan, a New York writer.

A group of Islamic experts urged the world's 1.6 billion Muslims on Tuesday to do more to fight global warming, in a new example of religious efforts to galvanise action before a UN climate summit in Paris in December. Christiana Figueres, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said religion was a guide for action. 

A new opinion poll released Thursday shows Americans in continued support of the goal to “downgrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State (ISIS), as President Obama has articulated it.

Assistant of Islamic Relations and Propagation of Astan Quds Razavi said, “Holy Astans and shrines of the Infallible Imams (A.S.) are the soft power of the Islamic World whose spiritual capacities should be employed.”