Richard Doughty

As the Mediterranean Sea's largest and most central island, Sicily has lured invaders, traders and travelers since antiquity, and each one has left its layers of legacy. From the ninth to the 12th century, Arabs and Normans dominated the island. Along its western coast, in its capital Palermo, the Arab-Norman royal court of King Roger I rose to become one of the most influential seats of power of its time. Since 2015 the UN has recognized a set of nine buildings whose syntheses of Byzantine, Arab and Norman designs epitomize the best of a time whose multiculturalism remains a foundation for Palermo today.

Walk into any mosque and at its front you are likely to see a stepped pulpit: the minbar. In Egypt, under the patronage of the Mamluk sultans of the 13th to 15th century, minbars became masterpieces of woodworking—most without nails or glue. Today nearly four dozen Mamluk minbars stand as a priceless but vulnerable heritage: A recent rash of thefts led to the Rescuing the Mamluk Minbars of Cairo Project, which offers protection, promotion and new opportunities for young artisans.

Sometime in the 12th century, at the center of a frequently contested region in what is now southwestern Spain, atop sheer cliffs that fall to the river below, hydraulic engineers working for the Almohad rulers of the taifa of Ronda began directing men wielding picks to carve, stroke by stroke, a secret staircase down through the rock to the river: It was a water mine, for use in case of siege, and it worked until May 13, 1485, when it was breached by the army of the Marquis of Cádiz. Cut off from water, the  town surrendered. The victory bolstered the Spanish campaign against the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, and in 1492, Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula was over. Now historians are taking a closer look—and finding more questions.

Ten years in the making and the first universal museum in the Arab world, the newly opened Louvre Abu Dhabi sets out a dozen themed galleries to tell cross-civilizational stories about the relationships of cultures—in every land, from the earliest settlements to today—that informed and inspired each other along their myriad respective quests of expression and beauty.

Welcome to FirstLook, which kicked off in the November/December 2015 print edition. We start in Fez, Morocco, as blue dusk settles in minutes after maghrib, or the sunset call to prayer. Find all FirstLook images amid others @aramcoworld on Instagram, as well as on our Facebook page.