Tracing the Roots of “Western” Heritage Back Home to MENA

The world remembers the destinations, but not always the beginnings.

While today we might sip a cup of coffee and immediately conjure up the image of a Venetian café, or catch a whiff of a sweet fragrance and suddenly crave croissants in Paris, our forefathers knew the truth: coffee, perfume, even universities—many of them first took root here, in the Middle East and North Africa.

Throughout history, ideas born in the region travelled along trade routes, carried by merchants, mystics, and scholars, only to be adopted, adapted, and eventually claimed elsewhere, in what we now call the West.

Coffee became Italian. Perfume, French. Universities, European. Yet if you follow the trail back far enough, the first chapters are written here.

From Yemen’s port of Al-Mokha, where Sufi mystics first brewed coffee to sustain midnight prayers, to Fez’s Al-Qarawiyyin, the university founded by Fatima al-Fihri centuries before Oxford, these roots still exist as places you can visit today. In Kashan, Iran, roses are distilled each spring as they were a thousand years ago, carrying the same notes that built the perfume industry. And in Baghdad’s museums, you can trace the origin of hospitals, pharmacies, and medical schools back to the Islamic Golden Age.

Even the guitar has its ancestor here: the oud, still played in Cairo, Beirut, and Aleppo with the same resonance it once carried across continents.

What the world remembers as “Western” heritage often began much earlier, on this side of the map. Here, the origins are still waiting for you. To see, taste, and hear for yourself.