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The Dispatch Team

The story leaves Tashkent

The story leaves Tashkent

On 7 October, the Center's account of Uzbekistan's place in Islamic civilisation goes in front of an audience that has heard a great many countries make a great many claims about their own history. At UNESCO Headquarters in Paris the event organisers will install an exhibition

Why everyone keeps saying “third Renaissance”

Why everyone keeps saying “third Renaissance”

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has used the phrase for years. Visitors to the Centre have started repeating it back to him. Here's what it actually means.

The Timurid Renaissance revealed

The Timurid Renaissance revealed

Among the international observers at a recent Center event was Dr. Rhiannon Garth Jones, editor of Medieval World: Culture & Conflict. An eminent academic expert on the era, she is working on a major article for her magazine. But she couldn't resist writing the following blog post. Timur

The machine behind the forum

The machine behind the forum

Delegates arrived in Tashkent this week for a media forum. The real story is what the Centre had already built long before they got there. This week's International Media Forum, “Islamic Civilization: New Look – New Discoveries,” brought delegates from 50 countries to Tashkent and Samarkand. But the more

The columns came from Portugal

The columns came from Portugal

Finland's Special Envoy for Central Asia, Maria Ögren, and Portugal's Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Sara Ferro Ribeiro, walked through the Islamic Civilization Center within days of each other. Both left impressed. Neither left with the same story. What Ögren saw: a mirror Ögren's route through

The room built around a single book

The room built around a single book

Walk to the architectural centre of the Islamic Civilization Center and you arrive at a room with one job: to hold a single book. The Qur'an Hall is both the conceptual and the physical heart of the museum, and the manuscript it was designed around is one of

The forum that kept writing back

The forum that kept writing back

The Centre's first international forum closed in Termez last month. The followup letters are still arriving By the Dispatch team For five days in July, the conversation about Islamic civilization moved between three cities. The First International Islamic Civilization Forum opened in Tashkent, continued in Samarkand, and closed