Taekwondo black belt Lina Khalifeh  started teaching self-defense to Jordanian friends in her parents' basement in 2010 after one of them confided that her father and brother hit her -- never expecting it would lead to an invitation to the White House.

Word about her classes quickly spread and two years later, overwhelmed by the demand, Khalifeh opened the country's first women-only martial arts center.

The United States may have seen an unprecedented anti-Muslim backlash in recent months, but one New York museum has challenged perceptions by teaching children about the wealth and diversity of Islamic culture.

The Children's Museum of Manhattan on the Upper West Side has been turned into an indoor playground where children can touch and experiment with artifacts of Muslim culture in a vibrant, colorful exhibition.

Boxing idol Muhammad Ali's gloves from the "most important sporting event in history" and pieces of his childhood home are among the artifacts at an exhibition in London honoring "the greatest".

The vast show opening on Friday at London's 02 Arena traces the story of the boxer from his childhood, through his glittering and brutal career to his elevation as a cultural and political icon.

New York is adding to its glittering portfolio of art museums with a new gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary art -- The Met Breuer, which opens with a retrospective of a little known Indian artist.

The gallery is housed in the modernist icon that Hungarian-born Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer built in 1966 on Madison Avenue for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which last year moved downtown to a spanking new site.

A man in southern Russia faces a potential jail sentence after he was charged with insulting the feelings of religious believers over an Internet exchange in which he wrote that "there is no God."

Viktor Krasnov, 38, who appeared in court Wednesday, is being prosecuted under a controversial 2013 law that was introduced after punk art group Pussy Riots was jailed for a performance in Moscow's main cathedral, his lawyer Andrei Sabinin told AFP.  

One of Germany's leading concert halls has expressed shock after a performance by an Iranian harpsichord virtuoso ended in a tumult with disgruntled concertgoers shouting at him to "speak in German".

"I was shocked and flabbergasted," the head of Cologne's prestigious Philharmonic Hall, Louwrens Langevoort, told AFP via telephone on Wednesday.

They arrived in Europe as child refugees fleeing civil war and are now running one of France's coolest fashion labels.

But the young Georgian brothers behind the hip brand Vetements, whose new collection hits the Paris catwalk Thursday, have still bigger plans -- to revolutionize the way the fashion business works.

Schools across Hungary were half-empty on Monday after parents kept their children at home as part of a growing revolt over the right-wing government's sweeping education reforms.

More than 34,000 people signed up to the protest on the Facebook page "I won't go to school", launched by 36-year-old mother Krisztina Puskas.

New regulations in the Islamist-ruled Gaza Strip that women must be accompanied by chaperones for driving lessons with male instructors have stirred a debate in the Palestinian enclave.

Local media were filled Monday with reports on the latest move in Gaza, controlled by the Islamist movement Hamas, to fall in line with Muslim tenets that women in public be accompanied by a husband or male family member.

Iran and Saudi Arabia's rivalry has played out in proxy wars across the region, and escalated further after the two severed diplomatic and trade ties last month. Yet in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, popular Iranian restaurants are outselling feverish calls for a boycott and stand as a reminder of when ties between the two countries held promise.

In the 1990s, inside steaming kitchens in Riyadh, Iranian chefs taught their counterparts how to season and cook Persian dishes for a Saudi-owned Iranian restaurant called Shayah. The food proved so popular that nearly 20 years later, Shayah is a chain with 13 outlets in the kingdom, 11 of them in Riyadh.