Shia Islam or Shi'ism is one of the two main branches of Islam. It holds that the Islamic prophet Muhammad designated Ali ibn Abi Talib as his successor and the Imam (spiritual and political leader) after him, most notably at the event of Ghadir Khumm, but was prevented from succeeding Muhammad as the leader of all Muslims as a result of the choice made by Muhammad's other companions at Saqifah. This view primarily contrasts with that of Sunni Islam, whose adherents believe that Muhammad did not appoint a successor before his death and consider Abu Bakr, who was appointed caliph by a group of senior Muslims at Saqifah, to be the first rightful caliph after Muhammad. A person observing Shia Islam is called a Shi'ite or Shi'i.

Shia Islam is the second largest branch of Islam: as of the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Shia Muslims constituted 10–15% of all Muslims. Shias form a majority of the population in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran, and Iraq, as well as a plurality in Lebanon. Shias constitute 36.3% of the entire population (and 38.6% of the Muslim population) of the Middle East.

Shia Muslims constitute 27-35% of the population in Lebanon, and as per some estimates from 35% to over 35–40% of the population in Yemen, 30%–35% of the citizen population in Kuwait (no figures exist for the non-citizen population), over 20% in Turkey, 5–20% of the population in Pakistan, and 10–19% of Afghanistan's population.

This is a collection of photos taken in my February 2023 trip to Ethiopia.

Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer.

New York City has been the site of several protests against the killing of George Floyd since May 28, 2020, with demonstrations taking place in all of the city's five boroughs. Most of the events have been peaceful, while some involved protester and/or police violence.

This is a collection of photos taken in my November 2020 trip to Afghanistan. I visited the Kabul, Herat, and Kandahar. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to visit the Bamiyan and Jalalabad for various reasons.

Oud is a short-neck lute-type, pear-shaped, fretless stringed instrument, usually with 11 strings grouped in six courses, but some models have 5 or 7 courses, with 10 or 13 strings respectively.

Hasidism, sometimes spelled Chassidism, and also known as Hasidic Judaism (Hebrew: חסידות‎), is a subgroup of Haredi Judaism that arose as a spiritual revival movement in the territory of contemporary Western Ukraine during the 18th century, and spread rapidly throughout Eastern Europe. Today, most affiliates reside in Israel and the United States.

There are approximately 1.5 million Jews in the New York metropolitan area, making it the second largest metropolitan Jewish community in the world, after the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area in Israel. Most of the Hasidic or Orthodox Jews live in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, and Borough Park.

Arbaeen is a Shiite religious observance that occurs forty days after the Day of Ashura. It commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein Ibn Ali الحسين بن علي بن أبي طالب the grandson of Muhammad, who was martyred on the 10th day of the month of Muharram. Al-Husayn ibn Ali and 71 of his companions were martyred by Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad's army in the Battle of Karbala in 61 AH (680 CE).

Arbaeen is the largest annual pilgrimage in the world, in which up to 45 million people go to the city of Karbala in Iraq. Many pilgrims travel from all over the world and many walk from all over the region passing through Najaf to Karbala which is about 80 kilometres. Many local people provide food and shelter for the pilgrims.

The Labor Day Parade (or West Indian Carnival) is an annual celebration held on American Labor Day (the first Monday in September) in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York City.

The main event is the West Indian Day Parade, which attracts between one and three million participants. The spectators and participators watch and follow the parade on its route along Eastern Parkway. Some of the Caribbean islands represented in the parade include Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Barbados, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Jamaica, Saint Vincent and Grenada, along with some Afro-Panamanians. mainland Caribbean countries such as Guyana, Suriname, and Belize also participate as well.

Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman from the western region, died three days after she was arrested by morality police, allegedly for violating laws that require women to cover their hair in public. While authorities said that she suffered a heart attack, Amini’s supporters said she was beaten by police and died as a result of her injuries.

La Ville de Port-au-Prince, or Downtown Port-au-Prince is the city center of Haiti's capital. The city was catastrophically affected by a massive earthquake in 2010, with large numbers of structures damaged or destroyed. Haiti's government estimated the death toll to be 230,000. Most of the central historic area of the city was destroyed, including Haiti's prized Cathédrale de Port-au-Prince, the capital building, Legislative Palace (the parliament building), Palace of Justice (Supreme Court building), several ministerial buildings, and at least one hospital.

Marché en Fer or Marché de Fer (English: Iron Market) also known as the Marché Hyppolite and the Marché Vallières is a public market in Haiti’s capital, Port‑au‑Prince. It was damaged by fire in 2008 and destroyed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, but was restored. In February 2018 it burned again, with one of the two halls being destroyed.

The Birds Market is located in the oldest part of Kabul in the maze of the old bazaar. It’s just a few streets with some of the oldest buildings in the city were you can buy many kinds of birds for food or recreation.

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that had begun in 2014. The invasion is the biggest attack on a European country since the Second World War. It is estimated to have caused tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of military casualties. By April 2023, about 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced. More than 8.2 million had fled the country by May 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II.

This is a collection of photos taken in my December 2019 trip to India. Nothing was planned, except my first hotel reservation in the Paharganj, New Delhi and my return flight back to NYC. In this trip I was able to visit the New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra and few villages around it, and Varanasi.

This is a collection of photos from the NYC and many places around the world.