Many here refer to all Muslims or Middle Easterners as Turks, and seem to know next to nothing about their religious beliefs.

"They pray to the god of the moon so they only gather at night," says Ms. Melendez.

The drop-out rates are highest in Grade 10, the first non-compulsory year of school, when many boys abandon their education to pursue jobs in the public sector.

the project’s mission is to spread the culture of human rights in an atmosphere of brotherhood, tolerance and forgiveness.

It also aims to enable both government and nongovernmental sectors to effectively implement relevant policies in line with Islamic values and international treaties and agreements.

The project aims to introduce regulations, laws and procedures in the Kingdom that protect human rights.

It will organize workshops, activities and campaigns, and publish a magazine about human rights.

The HRC will also work with the educational sector to introduce human rights in school curriculums.

“My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps.” Over the years, he visited hundreds of these queer, lesser-known monuments to collecting — from the Chinese Traditional Medicine Museum in Hangzhou, China, to the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, N.C.

His character Kemal visits museums, too — 5,723 of them, we learn from the novel. The similarities between Kemal and Orhan inspire a question that never fails to exasperate the author. He threw his voice, a complicated musical instrument, into the rhetorical query: “Mr. Pamuk, are you Kemal? Enough. No, I am not Kemal, but I cannot convince you that I am not Kemal. That is being a novelist.”