Over the street

And one story that always kind of captures my imagination

The street's lost culture

And you're listening to Kearning cultures

Over the last half century, as many nations around our region have gained independence from colonial regimes, they've had to ask themselves some really big questions.

For example, what is this country? What makes this nation our nation? And what symbols are going to define us? And also, who's going to make those decisions? In our episode today, we have two stories about the complicated paths two different countries have taken to arrive at these kinds

of decisions. And they take place in different time periods. In part one, Iraq grapples with the

idea of changing its flag after the American invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein. And then in part

two, the UAE finds this crazy inventive way to try and make money for its

newly found statehood. It's the strangest thing, and you'll never guess it, so you have to listen.

I'm Dana Balutz, and this is currenting cultures, stories from the Middle East and North Africa,

and the spaces in between.

Of the 22 Arab countries, most of them use some variation of the same four colors in their flags.

Red, white, black, and green. The exceptions are places like Somalia, Comoros, Djibouti, and Qatar.

Some countries use all four, Palestine, the UAE,

some just use two like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or Lebanon. People in the vexilology world,

which is a super funny word, but it means the study of flags. Call this the flag family.

When a group of countries countries flags look very similar.

It's not unusual. You have flag families in Africa. There's the Scandinavian countries where many of the

flags have a cross on them. The origin story around the pan-Arab flag, that is the earliest version of

the green, black, red, and white flag used during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in around 1916 is a little blurred.

Some people say it's a mash-up of several flags used by Arab national clubs.

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