During the Gulf War, Irag trucked artifacts and artworks from the Kuwait National Museum to Baghdad. When a UN-monitored restitution team arrived in the Iraqi capital in 1991, they found less was damaged or missing than many had feared. The KNM has labored since then to reconstruct exhibit halls, repair historic treasures and plan for a bright future.

In the 1930's, her father led residents of Hyderabad, one of south India's largest cities, in Gandhi's campaign to replace British cloth with a revival of Indian weaving. Since the 1970's, Suraiya Hasan has helped lead what has become a widespread revival of four elegant, centuries-old weaving styles that are now marketed around the world. Her success has brought a livelihood to hundreds of women and their families—and the school she founded offers education to village children.

In centuries past, Muslim rulers and patrons vigorously supported scholars and scientists. In modern times, the first multidisciplinary, international award sponsored from the Arab world has recognized 139 laureates from 35 countries in five categories—Service to Islam, Arabic literature, Islamic studies, science and medicine—with gold medals and cash awards of $200,000. Harvard sociobiologist Edward Wilson, 2000's co-laureate in science, calls the KFIP "bridge-building of a valuable and urgently needed kind."

Elephants once covered northern Africa. Now there is but one herd, descended from wanderers from East Africa. It plies the Sahelian plains and seasonal ponds of south-central Mali amid Tuareg pastoralists, whose wisdom and wit may help local leaders and international conservationists make their peaceful coexistence a fact of the future as well as the past.