JEDDAH, 19 July 2006 — Prince Charles officially opened the new Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London last night.

The SR37 million gallery was made possible thanks to a substantial donation from the Jameel family. Mohammed Jameel, the son of Abdul Latif Jameel, the late founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Group, has dedicated the museum to his father and mother, Nafisa.

“I am delighted and honored that the V&A’s new Islamic gallery is dedicated to the memory of my parents,” said Mohammed Jameel, the president and CEO of the Abdul Latif Jameel Group. “Our family has a keen interest in world cultures and promoting understanding between them, and a commitment to increasing understanding of the Islamic world.”

He said that over 285,000 people worldwide have viewed the international exhibition, which has been traveling the world during the three-year period of the gallery’s construction.

“The gallery will provide a showcase for the V&A’s acclaimed collection of Islamic art in all its beautiful and varied forms, religious and secular,” said Mark Jones, director of the V&A. “We hope it will help people to appreciate one of the world’s great cultures and spread a deeper understanding of Islamic art.”

The gallery houses over 400 objects selected from the museum’s collection of over 10,000 Islamic artifacts. The highlight of the gallery’s display is the Ardabil Carpet, the world’s oldest dated carpet, and one of the largest, most beautiful and historically important in the world.

Made in Iran in 1539, the carpet is the centerpiece of the new gallery. It has been redesigned so that it can be displayed, specially illuminated, horizontally at floor level, as it would originally have been. Measuring an impressive 10.5m x 5m and described by William Morris as a design of “singular perfection,” it is a masterpiece of Islamic art. It has not been exhibited in this fashion since 1892.

The new gallery houses over 400 objects, including a 17th-century storage jar from Iran, ceramics, textiles, carpets, metalwork, glass and woodwork, which date from the time of the Islamic Caliphate of the 8th and 9th centuries to the years preceding World War I.

Other displays will show the great skill and ingenuity of Islamic craftsmen, and illustrate the region’s religious life. An outstanding example is a richly decorated minbar (or pulpit) commissioned for a mosque in Cairo by Sultan Qaitbay, who ruled Egypt in the late 15th century.

The gallery opens to the public tomorrow.