Museum of Islamic Art

The Museum of Islamic Art's strength is breadth assembled at speed rather than depth built up over generations: an encyclopaedic run of Islamic decorative and manuscript art from Spain to Southeast Asia, 7th to 20th century, gathered mostly in a few years around 2000 through the purchasing programme of Sheikh Saud Al-Thani. Individual holdings that stand comparison with any encyclopaedic museum of Islamic art include the Blue Qur'an folio, the Damascus Room as a complete architectural interior, a strong run of dated and signed scientific instruments, and Mughal jewellery and hardstone carving. What the collection does not carry, on the evidence of its own published record, is the same depth of published acquisition history that older Western museum Islamic-art departments (built up over a century of documented purchases, gifts and excavation shares) can offer object by object.

The Museum of Islamic Art sits on its own artificial island in Doha Bay, 195 feet from the mainland Corniche and reached by bridges across a narrow channel. That distance was a condition the architect set rather than a site he was handed: I.M. Pei, coaxed out of retirement at 91 for the commission, turned down the mainland plots Qatar first proposed because he judged that a shoreline site would eventually be hemmed in by the city growing up around it. An island could not be encroached on. Construction of the landfill began in December 2003, the concrete structure went up over the following years, and the museum opened to the public in the winter of 2008 -- an official opening by Qatar's then head of the Qatar Museums Authority on 22 November, with the public admitted from 8 December.

Pei spent six months touring mosques and Islamic sites from Cordoba to Fatehpur Sikri looking for a single architectural idea that could stand for a tradition that in fact varies enormously by region and period. He found it, by his own account, in the 13th-century ablution fountain in the courtyard of the Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun in Cairo: a severe, stepped block form that comes alive in strong sunlight through its own shadows. The finished building translates that into creamy French limestone volumes stacked around a central dome and tower, blind to the desert side and opening a full glass wall north toward the Gulf and the West Bay skyline. A crescent-shaped park, connected to the museum by the same bridges, wraps the island and gives the building the setting -- palm avenue, promenade, uninterrupted view -- that a mainland plot could not have kept.

The collection the building was built to hold was assembled unusually fast. From 1997, Sheikh Saud bin Muhammad Al-Thani, then Qatar's Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage, directed an estimated 1.5 billion US dollars of state spending on Islamic art, manuscripts, jewellery, arms and textiles bought at pace from dealers and private collections worldwide, assembling in under a decade the core of what is now the Museum of Islamic Art's holdings. In February 2005, months before the building was finished, the Qatari authorities removed Sheikh Saud from his post and placed him under investigation for misuse of public funds; The Art Newspaper reported at the time that a senior government body was alleged to have spent some 275 million US dollars improperly, and that it was not always clear, even to the Qatari state, whether objects Sheikh Saud had bought belonged to him personally or to the nation. He was never restored to the post. He died in London in November 2014, at 48. The museum's own history pages do not discuss this period of the collection's formation; what became of the 2005 investigation, and how its outcome was resolved, is not established in the sources available for this record.

Construction and the opening went ahead regardless, with the museum's founding chief curator, Dr Oliver Watson, confirming at the height of the controversy that the building projects were unaffected. What resulted, when the museum opened in November-December 2008, was an encyclopaedic survey collection -- metalwork, ceramics, glass, textiles, manuscripts, jewellery and woodwork spanning three continents and roughly 1,400 years, 7th to 20th century -- built up not by decades of institutional acquisition but by one minister's few years of purchasing on the international market at a scale few institutions have matched before or since.

The permanent collection now occupies eighteen galleries across four floors, reorganised in the museum's 2021-22 reinstallation into two broad sequences. The first suite, on the ground floor, introduces themes that cut across the whole collection -- the Qur'an as word and object, the five pillars of religious practice, learning and the sciences under Muslim rule -- using masterpieces chosen to represent ideas rather than chronology. The upper floors then run geographically and historically: from the establishment of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, through the courtly arts of Islamic Spain, the Mediterranean as a corridor of pilgrimage and trade, Mamluk Egypt and Syria, the Ottoman provinces, the Safavid and Qajar arts of Iran, the Mughal courts of South Asia, and on to the Indian Ocean trade that carried Islamic material culture into Southeast Asia. The route is meant to be walked as a journey from Cordoba to Samarkand and beyond, not as a single narrative of one culture but as a demonstration of how wide a world the term 'Islamic art' actually covers.

Materials on display range from the expected -- Iznik tile, enamelled Mamluk glass, Persian and Mughal manuscript painting, Ottoman arms and armour -- to objects whose interest is as much documentary as aesthetic: dated and signed scientific instruments, a diplomatic gift inscribed for a Qing emperor, and textiles tied directly to named patrons and to the annual Hajj. A dedicated gallery is given to arms and armour of what the museum's own gallery notes call the 'gunpowder empires' -- Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal -- built around a set of Ottoman horse armour.

The single largest and most worked-on object in the galleries is not a case piece at all but an entire room. The Damascus Room is a complete Ottoman-Syrian reception room, dated by inscription to 1232 AH (1816-17 CE), bought disassembled and then found again -- 25 crates of it -- in Doha storage in the summer of 2016, having gone untouched since acquisition. Museum conservators spent years piecing together and restoring 427 individual wooden and stone components, applying gold leaf, tinfoil, pigment, lacquer and mirror-work back onto the 'ajami-technique wood surfaces that blend Ottoman pattern with Indo-Persian and European Rococo motifs. In the course of that work, conservator Dr Anke Scharrahs found that several of the room's ceiling panels had been turned over and redecorated at some point in their history, with older 17th-century paintings surviving, hidden, on their reverse faces -- a small piece of the room's own conservation history now displayed alongside the room itself.

Other objects the museum foregrounds in its own published highlights carry similarly specific documentation: an astrolabe cast and engraved in 984-85 CE and signed by the Buyid-era instrument-maker Hamid ibn al-Khidr al-Khujandi; a Mamluk incense burner inlaid with silver and gold and made expressly for Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qala'un; a folio from the Blue Qur'an, gold Kufic script on parchment dyed indigo, one of the most reproduced single objects in Islamic manuscript studies; and a Ka'ba door-curtain embroidered in Cairo for Sultan Abdulmecid I in 1846-47, tying the collection directly to the ritual life of Mecca rather than only to courtly patronage.

The museum closed for a ten-month facilities and gallery enhancement project starting in late 2021 and reopened on 5 October 2022 with all eighteen galleries redesigned and, the museum says, more than 1,100 objects on view, the majority of them not previously shown. The same reopening was paired with a narrower, verifiable claim: in November 2022 Qatar Museums announced that the Museum of Islamic Art had been certified carbon neutral by Det Norske Veritas Middle East against the international PAS 2060 standard, covering the operational footprint of electricity and water use, waste and visitor travel to the site for a one-year reporting period beginning in 2021. That certification, on the record available, is time-bound to that reporting period rather than an open-ended claim about the building going forward.

Architectural criticism of the building at its 2008 opening was largely admiring: Architectural Record's Paula Deitz described a design that 'married motifs of indigenous architecture to his clean monumental Modernist style' and situated it alongside Pei's late-career museums in Japan and China. A more pointed contemporary account in Bidoun, by Antonia Carver, agreed the building itself was significant -- 'perhaps the most architecturally significant public building in the area to date' -- but found the inaugural galleries thin on content, objects 'displayed...with minimal labels' and made to carry meaning through lighting and staging rather than historical explanation, and asked bluntly why Gulf states were building 'grand monuments to the arts' at all. Recent visitor reviews of the reinstalled 2022 galleries describe clear, well-translated English labelling and note the improvement without prompting; the museum's own materials do not frame the 2021-22 reinstallation as a response to that specific 2009 criticism, so the connection is an inference from before-and-after visitor accounts rather than a claim the museum makes for itself.

Visitors consistently single out I.M. Pei's building itself as the main event: the stepped limestone exterior, the five-storey central atrium with its dome and grand staircases, and the north-facing window onto Doha Bay draw as much comment as anything in the cases. The Mughal jewellery and the arms and armour gallery are the most-cited individual displays, and the free (for residents) admission and waterfront cafe are repeatedly flagged as reasons to stay longer than planned.