The Supreme Council for Tourism plans to open a number of museums across the country including an Islamic museum in Makkah, a Qur’an museum in Madinah and a major one in Jeddah.
It is a very welcome development. Awareness both abroad and at home of the country’s heritage and history ranges, with one or two notable exceptions, from poor to abysmal. The consequences of that are seen in the way historic sites have been left to rot or destroyed altogether to make way for the new — with no concern whatsoever for what is being lost. For the past 40 years or so, the past has been studiously ignored. It was perhaps understandable in the rush for development. But it is time attitudes changed. There is a need to experience history and heritage live — and museums are excellent places to engage with the past, learn about it and so discover why we are what we are today. Museums are not arid repositories of dead artifacts; they are a means of educating people about their culture and where they have come from as well as displaying the glories of their heritage. In that sense they are as important as colleges and universities. So, just as a treasure trove of funds is being spent on new universities across the Kingdom to ensure a highly skilled and educated work force for the future, it is entirely appropriate that funds are also spent on our cultural and Islamic heritage.
It is strange that in the country where Islam was born, there is no Islamic museum where a wealth of Islamic art and artifacts from across the centuries is on show. It is bizarre that, for that, you have to go to London or Paris or New York. Surely, the finest Islamic art collections should be in the land that is intimately associated with it, not in the Louvre or the Victoria and Albert Museum, wonderful though they are?
Interest in Islamic heritage has never been greater or fiercer. Earlier this month, three London auctioneers — Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams’ — held separate Islamic art sales. Records were broken at all three; the Sotheby’s sale fetched $43 million, double what had been estimated and more than the company’s Islamic art sales for the whole of last year.
It is perhaps a pity that the Supreme Commission was not at any of the sales buying in readiness for the new museums. At Sotheby’s, an 800-year-old key to the Kaaba was sold for $18 million, a record of an Islamic work of art. It would have made a prize exhibit for the new Islamic museum In Makkah. There are 58 others in existence (new ones were made to commemorate different caliphs) and all are already in museums. At the Christie’s sale was a leaf from a second -century Hijra copy of the Qur’an which sold for $5 million. It could have been the centerpiece of the planned Madinah museum.
Perhaps those who did acquire them can be persuaded to sell them on to the new museums. They are precisely what these new institutions need.
