From gauze through camlet to damask - the Middle East has been sending fabrics to the West for centuries. But what do tabby cats, milk-and-sugar and the mourners of Cyprus have to do with it?

In an age when architecture was the greatest of the Islamic arts, Cairo's great spared no expense in building sabils, charity expressed in stone. Today, the beautiful little buildings are almost forgotten antiquities.

For the first time in 1,400 years, a network of financial institutions has begun to form that work on Islamic principles. Are those institutions rivals of interest-based banks, or potential partners?

Flying protein for the Bedouin and the farmer's oldest enemy, locusts can eat green fields to stubble at a mile a day. Saudi Arabia, thepivotof the world-wide struggle, has more to lose than 25 years ago.

Once he was Cat Stevens, the British singer-songwriter superstar. Today he is Yusuf Islam, whose life revolves around his Muslim faith, his family, and a school in North London where the children play.