Category: Diverse

By Oula Mahfouz Damask is a traditional textile fabric known for its remarkable patterning and high quality. The name “damask,” which is also commonly used in German, comes from the Arabic term “damas,” which refers to the city of Damascus in ancient Syria. The word is first documented in German in the 15th century and was adopted from the Italian word “damasto”. This is because Italian merchants first brought the damask fabric to Germany. Originally, damask fabric originated in the ancient Orient and was further developed over time in different cultures. Traditionally, damask was made from threads of silk and… Read More

By Oula Mahfouz and Michael Seifert Brain researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, have used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to compare how language processing works in the brains of Arabic and German native speakers. In the process, they came across quite surprising results: “Arabic speakers have a strong connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, whereas in German native speakers the connections within the left brain hemisphere are more strongly developed,” explains Alfred Anwander, the head of the study in an interview with tünews INTERNATIONAL. “Our study is… Read More

By Oula Mahfouz and Ute Kaiser Munich, Aachen, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Offenbach, Unna, Zwickau: This is how I have to spell my last name on the phone so that people can spell it correctly—M A H F O U Z. Until a year ago, it read like this: Martha, Anton, Heinrich, Friedrich, Otto, Ulrich, Zacharias. In May 2022, the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) abolished the old spelling table. City names replace given names in it. Since then, the T no longer stands for Theodor, but for Tübingen. The reason for the new version: The anti-Semitism commissioner of Baden-Württemberg had pointed… Read More

Why are Easter eggs colorful? Children would be told: so that they can more easily find the eggs that the Easter Bunny hides for them in the green grass. But that’s just one story surrounding the brightly painted chicken eggs. Easter eggs, which are colorfully dyed in the week before the Christian Easter, have a long tradition in Christianity. Eggs have been considered a symbol of fertility there for many centuries. But how it came to egg coloring and thus to today’s “Easter eggs” is not clearly documented. There are several explanations. One of them, according to Wikipedia, says that… Read More

By Oula Mahfouz The term “Halal” is often used when referring to food, but what exactly does it mean in the Islamic religion? The word “Halal” means “permitted” and refers to things and actions that are allowed in Islam, but it does not only refer to food. The opposite of the word “Halal” is the word “Haram”. In between is the word “Makruh” and it means “unpopular” or “undesirable”. This denotes what one should rather not do, but if one does not do it, it is not a sin. What is considered “Halal” and “Haram”, there are sometimes different opinions.… Read More

By Sameer Ibrahim People in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, knew singing and music since ancient times. There are written sources for this on clay tablets and archaeological findings of musical instruments from the Sumerian culture of up to 6,000 years ago. Everyone knows what invasions and wars Iraq has experienced, the voice of song always expressed the feelings and concerns of the people. Therefore, the Iraqi song was characterized by sadness. This sadness has become a characteristic that distinguishes Iraqi music from music in other Arab countries. A famous Iraqi singer coined the phrase, “A person without sadness is a jubilee… Read More