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Four Qatari match officials were selected for the 2026 World Cup, alongside four referees chosen for AFC Champions League finals, highlighting Qatar’s growing officiating profile.
Four Qatari match officials have been selected for the FIFA World Cup 2026, in a further boost to the country’s growing presence in global football officiating.
Abdulrahman Al Jassim will serve as a referee, Saoud Al Maqaleh and Taleb Al Marri as assistant referees, and Khamis Al-Marri as a video match official.
The announcement comes as four Qatari referees were also selected by the Asian Football Confederation to officiate the final stages of the AFC Champions League Elite, set to take place in Jeddah from 16 to 25 April.
Al Jassim and Salman Falahi will serve as referees in the continental competition, while Ramzan Al Nuaimi and Taleb Al Marri have been named assistant referees, highlighting continued confidence in Qatari officiating at the Asian level.
The selections coincide with the ninth meeting of the Referees Committee of the Qatar Football Association, held on Thursday, to review performance and discuss plans for the remainder of the season and beyond.
During the meeting, the committee assessed recent work, identifying key strengths and challenges to further enhance refereeing standards, and reviewed upcoming activities and programmes through to the end of the current sporting season.
Preparations for the next season were also discussed, including scheduling referees’ annual leave, setting the date for the resumption of activities, and organising the annual pre-season training camp aimed at improving physical and technical readiness.
The continued presence of Qatari officials at both global and continental levels reflects their growing reputation and role in developing refereeing standards across international football.
Paper won 2 merit awards in print category, 1 digital merit award for documentary marking newspaper’s 50th anniversary.
Arab News has picked up three merit awards from The Society of Publication Designers as it continues its streak of recent accolades.
Saudi Arabia’s first English-language daily won two merit awards in the print category: a 2025 year-end opinion page on predictions for 2026 — featuring a dove holding an olive branch atop a globe-shaped hand grenade — and a spotlight page focusing on children’s education being caught in the crossfire of conflict, illustrated with a child-like hand-drawn image of books and students amid the bombs.
Arab News also received a digital merit award for its documentary marking the newspaper’s 50th anniversary.
Omar Nashashibi, head of design at Arab News, said: “It’s always an honor to win awards, especially in design competitions as prestigious as the SPDs. These awards wouldn’t be possible without the talented teams across Arab News, and the brilliant partners we collaborated with for our ‘Rewriting Arab News’ documentary and illustration for ‘The year that could be’ opinion piece.”
Founded in 1965, the SPD celebrates “anyone contributing to the creation of visual stories” and is dedicated to promoting excellence in editorial design, photography and illustration across print and digital platforms.
This year’s competition included entries from The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Wired, Eater, and The Economist.
The total number of accolades won by Arab News has now reached 163 under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Faisal J. Abbas, who has overseen the newspaper’s digital transformation.
Past recognition includes special projects such as Arab News’ 50th anniversary edition, “The Kingdom vs. Captagon” deep dive and the “Paris 2024 Olympic Games” special edition.
Launched in 2025, the Art Basel Awards are dedicated to recognizing excellence across the contemporary art world
Medalists are evaluated on: vision and innovation, skill and execution, engagement, and broader impact.
The Diriyah Biennale Foundation has been named as a medalist in the 2026 Art Basel Awards.
Selected as part of the Museum and Institution category alongside The Brick in Los Angeles and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Diriyah Biennale Foundation has been recognized as a “key platform for regional artistic development” by the leading Swiss art fair.
“The Diriyah Biennale Foundation has been committed to bringing together artists, communities, and ideas across geographies,” said the foundation’s CEO Aya Al-Bakree in a statement.
“This award affirms that Saudi Arabia has a vital role to play in the global cultural conversation.”
Launched in 2025, the Art Basel Awards are dedicated to recognizing excellence across the contemporary art world.
Medalists are evaluated on: vision and innovation, skill and execution, engagement, and broader impact.
“Through this initiative, Art Basel reaffirms its role as a global platform for the advancement, discovery and production of art — not only recognizing excellence but actively creating the conditions for it to grow,” said Vincenzo de Bellis, chair of the award’s jury and chief artistic officer and global director of Art Basel Fairs.
“We are deeply grateful to our jury, nominators and the many experts whose insight and commitment make this process both rigorous and collaborative. It is this community-driven approach that defines the awards, reflecting the breadth and complexity of today’s cultural landscape.”
Founded in 2020 and chaired by Minister of Culture Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Farhan, the Diriyah Biennale Foundation has emerged as a transformative force in the international cultural landscape.
Through its two flagship recurring events, the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Diriyah and the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, alongside the stewardship of the JAX creative district in Riyadh, the Diriyah Biennale Foundation is a force that drives cultural exchange between Saudi Arabia and the world.
“In Interludes and Transitions,” the third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and the fifth Biennale organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, is open until May 2, 2026 at JAX District.
source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)
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In Interludes and Transitions,” the third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and the fifth Biennale organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, is open until May 2, 2026 at JAX District. (Supplied)
Egyptian author and academic Reem Bassiouney launched her latest novel, Kom El-Nour: Abbas Helmy II, at a book-signing ceremony held at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo on 1 April, presenting a historical work that revisits the reign of Egypt’s last Khedive.
The event, organized by Nahdet Misr Publishing House, was attended by Minister of Social Solidarity Maya Morsy, American University in Cairo (AUC) President Ahmad Dallal, Egyptian Red Crescent (ERC) Executive Director Amal Imam, jewellery designer Azza Fahmy, as well as several public figures, media representatives, and readers.
Kom El-Nour takes readers into one of the most consequential periods in Egypt’s modern history, focusing on the rule of Khedive Abbas Helmy II, son of Khedive Tawfiq and grandson of Khedive Ismail, who governed Egypt from 1892 to 1914.
The novel presents Abbas Helmy II from a different perspective, portraying him as a ruler who grew up among Egyptians, shared aspirations for the country’s advancement, and sought to resist British occupation through development and reform.
It highlights his efforts to modernize agriculture, support national institutions, and contribute to the formation of an educated elite capable of expressing society’s aspirations and defending its rights.
The book also explores the ongoing struggle between Abbas Helmy II and the British occupation, as well as the political pressures that ultimately led to his removal from power and exile in 1914. He spent the rest of his life in Europe until he died in 1944.
Despite his forced departure, the novel argues that Abbas Helmy II remained present in Egypt’s national memory, even as colonial authorities sought to erase his legacy and marginalise his role in historical narratives.
Through an engaging literary narrative, Kom El-Nour: Abbas Helmy II re-examines history from a fresh angle and invites readers to reconsider the events and figures that helped shape Egypt’s national consciousness. It also raises broader questions about how history is written and understood, particularly as certain patterns continue to echo across time.
Speaking at the launch, Dalia Ibrahim, Chairperson of Nahdet Misr Publishing House, said the novel reflects the role literature can play in revisiting history and reshaping public awareness.
“At Nahdet Misr, we believe literature has a real role in reshaping consciousness, especially when it revisits history from different perspectives,” Ibrahim explained.
“Kom El-Nour: Abbas Helmy II is an example of the kind of work that does not merely recount events, but encourages readers to think and re-examine what is often taken for granted. We are very proud of our partnership with Reem Bassiouney and of continuing to publish works of such depth and impact.”
The novel also reflects the continued partnership between Nahdet Misr Publishing House and Bassiouney, whose literary output now includes 13 works of fiction. The publishing house has become the principal publisher of her novels, beginning with the reissue of her debut novel, The Scent of the Sea, in January and continuing with Kom El-Nour.
According to the publisher, the collaboration aims to bring distinguished literary works to a wider readership in Egypt and abroad.
Shams is part of the Artemis II program that aims to accelerate scientific innovation .
The Saudi Space Agency announced the successful launch and initial communication with the Saudi satellite Shams, which was deployed aboard the Space Launch System as part of the Artemis II mission.
With this achievement, the Kingdom becomes the first Arab nation to participate in a space mission under the historic Artemis program, which aims to accelerate scientific innovation and foster high-impact international partnerships that contribute to shaping the future of space for humanity, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
Artemis II represents the second phase of the Artemis program, led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in collaboration with international partners.
The mission aims to return humans to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in more than five decades, paving the way for future missions to Mars. It carries a crew of four astronauts on the first crewed lunar flyby mission aboard the Orion spacecraft, powered by the Space Launch System, the most powerful launch vehicle ever developed.
The mission also carries the Saudi satellite Shams as part of its scientific payload.
The Shams satellite will operate in a highly elliptical orbit, ranging from approximately 500 km to 70,000 km above Earth.
This orbit enables broad coverage for monitoring solar and radiation activity, enhancing space weather research, providing an advanced scientific environment, and supporting critical applications associated with it.
Shams represents a multi-first achievement. It is the first Arab mission launched as part of the Artemis program and the first national mission dedicated to space weather monitoring, underscoring the Kingdom’s progress in advanced space technologies.
The satellite was developed domestically by Saudi talent, supported by initiatives under the National Industrial Development and Logistics Program, one of the key enablers of Saudi Vision 2030.
The mission aims to study space weather and monitor the effects of solar and radiation activity on Earth through four main scientific domains: space radiation, solar X-rays, Earth’s magnetic field, and high-energy solar particles.
This scientific mission contributes to enhancing the reliability and sustainability of critical sectors linked to space, such as communications, aviation, and navigation, by providing data that supports operational readiness and strengthens the security of the technical infrastructure relied upon globally in daily life.
Acting CEO of the Saudi Space Agency Dr. Mohammed bin Saud Al-Tamimi said: “This milestone reflects the Kingdom’s scientific and technological advancement under Vision 2030 and underscores its active role in developing advanced technologies and shaping the future of space for humanity.”
CEO of the National Industrial Development and Logistics Program Jameel bin Ahmed Al-Ghamdi stated that developing the Shams satellite within the Kingdom reflects the impact of the program’s initiatives in localizing advanced technologies and building competitive national industrial capabilities.
source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)
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The Saudi Space Agency announced the successful launch and initial communication with the Saudi satellite Shams, which was deployed aboard the Space Launch System as part of the Artemis II mission. (SPA)
For Ahmad Nabil, paranormal encounters are real. If they weren’t, the entire Arab world would have to be insane.
There is a word in Arabic -al-hātif- that means the telephone. It also means a disembodied voice, and it can refer to the unseen caller: the jinn who summons you from somewhere beyond sight. It could be that Arabs named their phones after a supernatural entity, and almost nobody finds this strange.
Luckily, Ahmad Nabil finds it extraordinary.
“The root of jinn,” he tells CairoScene, speaking across a bad phone line from Jerusalem to Alexandria, “means to hide, to be concealed from the senses. From that root you get majnūn: madness, being overtaken, possessed. You get janna, paradise. You get janīn, the embryo, that which is still hidden inside. And you also get the genie – English borrowed that one from us.”
Ahmad Nabil studies the supernatural in our region, pulling back the surface of the Arabic-speaking world to reveal what runs beneath it. And once you lift a stone in that garden, an entire ecosystem waits.
He is 37 years old and lives and works in Beit Safafa, a Palestinian town southwest of Jerusalem. In his telling, it has always felt slightly outside of everywhere: isolated enough in the 1990s that the roads were dirt, children eventually manufactured their own entertainment, and jinn had plenty of room to roam.
Nabil is a visual artist, researcher, and educator, and the founder of Majlis al-Khayal, The Fiction Council, a Palestinian nonprofit dedicated to preserving and reviving Palestinian and Arab mythology and paranormal folklore. Since 2015, he has been collecting these stories, illustrating them, and insisting that imagination is not a luxury.
“Without imagination,” he says, “we can’t build better societies for ourselves. And we end up with others building them for us.”
Nabil’s childhood was not one of comfortable distance from the world. It was shaped by occupation, constant constraint, and the particular texture of Palestinian life in Jerusalem. But it was also expansive in the imagination.
“The lack of entertainment made us create our own,” he says. “We had self-generating input. We didn’t have as much external influence as kids do these days.”
As an adult, after studying design and applied arts in Jordan and later throwing himself into art training in Jerusalem, he kept encountering children with unusually vivid and imaginative minds.
“You know the one,” Nabil laughs. “The child in every classroom who talks about black holes and space-time, who has their own theories about mythical creatures at seven years old. The kid who gets either revered or relentlessly bullied depending on which room they’re in.”
Those were his people.
In 2015, he founded Majlis al-Khayal from a small studio, and one of its main projects was gathering exactly those children. Twelve of them eventually joined, each one arriving in a familiar way: a mother calling, exasperated, saying her son wouldn’t stop talking about things nobody understood, that his imagination was out of control, that she didn’t know what to do with him.
“I would meet the child and tell him: you’re not alone. I knew you’d bring your monsters with you.”
Those 12 are young adults now, university students: artists, designers, developers, scientists. But Nabil tended their imaginations for as long as he could.
In 2019, through The Fiction Council, Ahmad Nabil launched Darb al-Ghilan, ‘Road of the Ghūls’. The project maps ghoul folklore village by village across Palestine and documents encounters with jinn.
Its first field trip took place in early 2020, in Rahat in the Naqab desert of southern Palestine.
“Every Palestinian village has its own ghoul,” Nabil explains. “And the creature’s characteristics vary according to the topography, geography, and the relationship between that community and its land. The ghoul of a coastal village is not the ghoul of a hilltop village. The ghoul of a farming community is not the ghoul of a shepherding one.”
The ghoul (ghūl) in Arabic folklore is a malevolent, flesh-eating jinn-like creature classically associated with luring travellers to their deaths in the desert. It also helped shape the Western idea of the zombie, particularly through American pop culture and Antoine Galland’s 18th-century French translation of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, which added cemetery-roaming and cannibalistic elements that were less emphasised in the Arabic original.
So far, ‘Uns al-Khafi’ is the first published output of Road of the Ghūls. ‘Uns al-Khafi’, or ‘Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem’, was published in August 2022. It was researched, written, and illustrated by Ahmad Nabil, designed by Omaima Dajani, and edited by Nairouze Khaldy. The book draws on interviews with 60 people and more than 35 hours of recorded testimony.
It sold out in less than 10 months. A second edition appeared in 2024 and is nearly gone. An English translation is now underway, and Nabil himself no longer owns a copy of the first edition.
“I titled the book ‘Uns al-Khafi’ because during my fieldwork I noticed that people in the Old City were profoundly at ease with the idea of jinn,” Nabil says. “They greet them in the morning and the evening.”
The book documents white-clad faceless figures, righteous jinn performing wudu at dawn, mischievous presences, and ghostly encounters linked to Mamluk-era houses with subterranean caves beneath them.
“People don’t want to be judged,” Nabil says. “They don’t want to be thought of as fabricating stories. They have to trust you first, and trust that you believe them.”
Interestingly, Nabil does not classify these encounters as mythology.
“I do not consider these legends,” he says. “I do not consider them khurafat, superstition. I consider them khawāriq, supernatural occurrences. Whether you believe in them or not is entirely your business.”
For Muslims, jinn are not mythological at all; they are theological. An entire surah of the Qur’an is named after them.
“They are accountable creatures, as humans are,” Nabil says. “There are doctors among them. Engineers. Pilots. And the sayyi’in, the delinquents, just as we have delinquents.”
Sorcerers might deal with those delinquents. Poets might receive inspiration from jinn poets whispering lines in the night.
“The Bible, on the other hand, has no jinn,” Nabil says. “Christian Palestinians might use the word spirits, but their framework is good versus evil. There’s no room for the specific, intimate social world of the jinn, who live among us with their own behaviours, hierarchies, and reasons for appearing or disappearing.”
It is this world, its textures, its site-specific stories, the particular jinn of a particular well in a particular village, that Nabil guides people into on foot.
One October evening at dusk, in the village of Qalandia north of Jerusalem, he gathered a group and began walking.
Qalandia is not, on the surface, an obvious setting for a supernatural tour. Today it is best known for one of the most heavily militarised crossing points in the West Bank, a daily humiliation that has grotesquely become shorthand for the occupation itself.
But Qalandia also once had maqamat: shrines of holy men and women scattered across the Jerusalem rural side.
The tour, Dastour ya Ahl al-Maqam (‘Permission, O Residents of the Shrine’), was a collaboration with Riwaq, the Centre for Architectural Conservation. The walk moved through the village’s memory: the byar, the wells, and the stories attached to them. They touch on the paranormal encounters said to have happened there, the relationships between women and the wells, men and the harvest, and the lament tradition known as tenwih, which Nabil describes as “wounds the heart.”
The destination was Sittna al-Mabrouka, Our Blessed Lady, a maqam that, at the time of the walk, existed only as a playground for children, with a pile of stones beside it.
In one story connected to the site, the Blessed Lady appears to someone who has wronged her and walks toward them without speaking, her back always turned, until the moment of confrontation.
Nabil placed a performer along the route, standing with her back to the walkers at a particular corner, waiting.
“When you bring the experience as close to the participants as possible,” he tells me, “it lingers in their minds.”
The tour ends at the candlelit stones of Sittna al-Mabrouka.
“You know your stories matter,” Nabil says, “because when Israeli forces first raided Qalandia in 1967, soldiers came to a local man with a map and asked him to point out the location of this maqam. It’s the first thing they always do. Strike the sacred.”
The English translation of Uns al-Khafi is nearly complete, with a New York book tour planned for May through June 2026.
After that, Nabil hopes to renovate his family home in Beit Safafa, a building more than 130 years old, into a full research and documentation center for Palestinian mythology, imagination, and the paranormal.
“I do this because an empty place is a vulnerable place,” he says. “If we are not present there, in that density of life and story, others move in. In fact, many of our old stone reservoirs, settlers have started swimming in them.”
Lamia was first elected in 2014 in Paris’s 20th district and quickly took on responsibilities related to health, disability, and mental health.
Moroccan-born politician Lamia El Aaraje has been elected as the new First Deputy Mayor of Paris, in replacement of the outgoing Patrick Bloche.
Born on November 22, 1986, in Rabat, El Aaraje is known as a key figure in the city’s Socialist Party and for her firm political stance, especially her opposition to the radical leftist party La France Insoumise.
She moved to France at the age of 18 to pursue her studies. She later built a strong career within the Socialist Party and rose through the ranks to become the first secretary of the party’s powerful Paris federation in 2023, a position she held until mid-2025.
El Aaraje is part of what has been described as the party’s social-democratic wing. She played a major role in building alliances during the recent political campaign, helping bring together socialists, environmentalists, and communists early on. She also supported key figures such as Emmanuel Grégoire and previously backed Rémi Féraud in the Socialist primary race.
‘I changed my opinion about her during the campaign’
Before entering politics, El Aaraje earned a doctorate in pharmacy but chose not to practice. Instead, she shifted toward health law and worked in leadership roles at mutual insurance organizations. Her political engagement began in the 2010s, including her time as a student union leader at the University of Limoges.
She was first elected in 2014 in Paris’s 20th district and quickly took on responsibilities related to health, disability, and mental health. She gained more influence over the years. She served as a Paris councilor and led key city committees on public spaces, infrastructure, and safety.
El Aaraje also briefly served as a member of parliament in 2021 before her election was rejected by the Constitutional Council. She later lost a re-election bid in 2022 to Danielle Simonnet.
Despite political rivalries, colleagues across the spectrum describe her as determined, hardworking, and highly organized. “I changed my opinion about her during the campaign. I mainly saw the brutal side of the character,” AFP quoted a Parisian elected official from the majority as saying. “In reality, she has a great work ethic, she is determined, and has excellent organizational skills.”
Lamia El Aaraje
Élue conseillère de Paris le 28 juin 2020. (Liste “Paris en Commun-Ecologie pour Paris”)
Élue conseillère métropolitaine le 28 juin 2020
Le Conseil de Paris du 23 juillet 2020
Hôtel de ville de Paris
Photo : Delphine Goldsztejn
Egypt-based Tunisian filmmaker and actor Dhafer L’Abidine has won the Best Director Award at the Manchester Film Festival (19 to 29 March), for his latest feature Sophia.
Set between Europe and North Africa, Sophia follows Emily, a woman who travels from London to Tunisia against her father’s wishes in an attempt to reconnect her daughter, Sophia, with her estranged husband.
The situation quickly spirals into crisis when the young girl disappears, plunging the fractured family into a web of secrets and deception. As tensions mount, Emily races against time to uncover the truth and find her daughter.
The film features an international cast led by Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey, Brave New World), alongside Dhafer L’Abidine, Kais Setti (Dogs of Berlin, Blood Red Sky), and veteran actor Jonathan Hyde (Titanic, Anaconda).
Sophia, a family thriller, is a co-production between Double A Productions and New Sparta Productions, with cinematography by Willie Nel and editing by Hafedh Laaridhi. The film’s original score was composed by Selim Arjoun.
The film had its world premiere at the Marrakech International Film Festival, launching its global festival journey to critical attention.
Dhafer L’Abidine
L’Abidine, 53, a graduate of the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama, built his early career in British television, appearing in series such as Dream Team and Spooks. He later featured in international productions including Children of Men and Sex and the City 2, before becoming widely known in the Arab world through television dramas such as Maktoub, Halawat El Donia, and Arous Beirut.
Behind the camera, he made his directorial debut with Ghodwa, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cairo International Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Golden Globe Awards.
His second feature, To My Son, earned Best Film at the Hollywood Arab Film Festival, further establishing him as a prominent Arab filmmaker working across international markets.
The event forms part of the Umrah and Ziyarah Forum from March 30 to April 1 at the King Salman International Convention Center in Madinah.
King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, in cooperation with the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah and the Pilgrim Experience Program, is organizing a forum on historical sites associated with the Prophet’s biography.
The event forms part of the Umrah and Ziyarah Forum from March 30 to April 1 at the King Salman International Convention Center in Madinah.
Several researchers and specialists in Prophetic biography and Islamic history will attend the three-day forum, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Sunday.
Organizing the forum is part of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to serve the Prophetic biography, aiming to enhance the scientific documentation of historical sites associated with it and highlight their intellectual and cultural value.
The forum will focus on several key pillars, notably documenting the landmarks of the Prophet’s life, linking its events to geographical locations, and supporting specialized scientific research.
It also includes scientific sessions discussing mechanisms for verifying historical narratives and distinguishing between authentic and unreliable accounts.
Additionally, the forum reviews the Kingdom’s efforts to revive historical sites related to the Prophetic biography and present them through modern technologies and innovative approaches that enrich the visitor experience.
