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# The columns came from Portugal
- URL: https://www.turathdispatch.org/the-columns-came-from-portugal/
- Published: 2026-08-09T17:22:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T22:59:30.000Z
- Author: The Dispatch Team

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 exhibition took her past the halls devoted to Central Asia's pre-Islamic and early history — the material furthest, on paper, from Helsinki. She found it familiar anyway. Finland has its own tradition of nomadic culture, and walking the galleries she recognised threads connecting Finland's history to Uzbekistan's. Her reading of the Centre wasn't about Islamic civilisation as a foreign subject to be explained to her; it was about a method — using history and culture to build a nation's sense of itself — that she saw as universal, and portable.

**What Ferro Ribeiro saw: a signature**

The Portuguese ambassador's attention went somewhere more specific: the Qur'an Hall, home to the Mushaf of Caliph Uthman, and its mosaic work and jewellery displays. Then she noticed the columns. The pink marble supporting the hall that houses the Centre's most sacred manuscript was sourced from Portugal — a detail small enough to miss and large enough, once you know it, to change how the room reads. A hall built around a seventh-century Islamic manuscript, held up by stone from the Iberian Peninsula. Ferro Ribeiro called the digital technology woven through the exhibition a reason young people especially should visit.