9/11 Tenth Anniversary, “Ribbons Of Hope” Project – a set on Flickr

Sacred Space: Islamic Architecture 2.0. Maryam Eskandari, an architect at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and MIT, currently has a traveling exhibit on American Mosques. Her exhibit, Sacred Space: (Re) Constructing the Place of Gender in the Space of Religion is touring the nation. 

A medieval monument to religious pluralism, hidden in the mountains of Afghanistan. One of the great wonders of the medieval world is a very tall, heavily ornamented minaret nestled in a green valley at the edge of the Jam river in what is now Afghanistan. Often called the Minaret of Jam, the monument was almost a millenium ago illuminated by a torch at its top, and surrounded by a thriving town with small industries and outlying farms.  What’s remarkable is that the writing on the minaret and archaeological remains nearby strongly suggest that the city harbored a population of Muslims,…