Kerning Cultures

A blind oud player from humble beginnings, Sheikh Imam's destiny changed drastically when he met a dissident poet called Ahmed Fouad Negm, and they formed a duo. Together, they would go on start a ne…

Stuck in his Palestinian hometown of Jenin during lockdown, Mo'min Swaitat walked into an old music shop where thousands of dusty cassettes lined the walls. They contained decades of Palestinian musi…

In the 1960s, a college professor and his group of students were determined to build and launch rockets into space. And so, they did. This week, on Kerning Cultures, a story about the first-ever rock…

Azzam Alwash remembers the marshlands of southern Iraq as a magical place, where he would spend long days gliding through the thick reeds by boat with his father. But for decades now, the area has be…

In the 1930s, the architect Nasri Khattar had an idea to singlehandedly overhaul the Arabic script. For the next 47 years, he worked day and night to get the world to adopt his writing system, Unifie…

In 2012, a Yazidi family fled to Sweden in the hope of a better life, far from persecution. After nearly six troubled years struggling to seek asylum without proper paperwork, their traumatised daugh…

A warning: This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence and assault.

As Egyptian women celebrated the arrest of serial predator and rapist Ahmed Bassam Zaki in the summer of 2020, another cas…

A warning: This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence and assault.

In the summer of 2020, a 22-year-old Egyptian woman made the difficult decision to publicly call out her harasser on socia…

In 1917, a musical prodigy called Zabelle Panosian recorded a song that captured the heartbreak of a generation of Armenian Americans in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide. She toured the world, …

In 1962 the library at the University of Algiers was burned to the ground, turning hundreds of thousands of books to dust. But it was overshadowed by Algeria's independence from the French, and was l…

Ho…

This week, we're following the trail of an elusive camel herder called Hadj Ali (or, as the Americans called him; Hi Jolly). He was one of the first people from the Middle East to move to the USA, an…

How do you preserve a language when your government is actively trying to erase it?

Abduweli Ayup is a Uyghur linguist who was trying to stop the Chinese government from replacing Uyghur with Mandarin…

A family secret, hidden for decades by a grandfather in Iraq, gets uncovered by his grandson - who chooses to revive a potentially dangerous legacy.

This episode was produced by Alex Atack and Tamara …

During the Syrian war, a group of archeologists risk their lives to record the damage being done to their country's cultural heritage, just as it was being taken away from them.

This episode was writt…

Since 9/11, US governmental agencies have poured millions of dollars into spying on Arabs, Muslims and Arab Americans. Their surveillance has changed countless lives as ordinary citizens all over the…

Kerning Cultures season 3 launches next week, January 27th. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get podcasts so you don't miss an episode.

Support this podcast on patreon.com/kerningcultures for as li…

Ahead of the latest season (which launches at the end of this month!), our team gets together to talk about what they're excited for, and what they've learned from producing the upcoming season of Ke…

Lynn left behind her hometown village in the Philippines for a housekeeping job in Lebanon at the age of 23. It was only meant to be temporary… until she met Butros, her employer's nephew, and they f…

His whole life, Walid Waked had been told that his great grandfather invented the Arabic typewriter. And then, one day, he learned that another family – the Haddads – believed they invented it. This …