The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Islamic art is a part of Islamic culture and encompasses the visual arts produced since the 7th century CE by people who lived within territories inhabited or ruled by Muslim populations. Referring to characteristic traditions across a wide range of lands, periods, and genres, Islamic art is a concept used first by Western art historians in the late 19th century. Public Islamic art is traditionally non-representational, except for the widespread use of plant forms, usually in varieties of the spiralling arabesque. These are often combined with Islamic calligraphy, geometric patterns in styles that are typically found in a wide variety of media, from small objects in ceramic or metalwork to large decorative schemes in tiling on the outside and inside of large buildings, including mosques. Other forms of Islamic art include Islamic miniature painting, artefacts like Islamic glass or pottery, and textile arts, such as carpets and embroidery.
Hijazi script, also Hejazi, literally "relating to Hejaz", is the collective name for a number of early Arabic scripts that developed in the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, which includes the cities of Mecca and Medina. This type of script was already in use at the time of the emergence of Islam. A calligraphic Hijazi script is called a Ma'il script, these are found in a number of the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts. The two terms are often used interchangeably.
Beit Al Qur'an is a multi-purpose complex dedicated to the Islamic arts and is located in Hoora, Bahrain. Established in 1990, the complex is most famous for its Islamic museum, which has been acknowledged as being one of the most renowned Islamic museums in the world.
The Department of Asia in the British Museum holds one of the largest collections of historical objects from Asia. These collections comprise over 75,000 objects covering the material culture of the Asian continent, and dating from the Neolithic age up to the present day.
The Art & History Museum is a public museum of antiquities and ethnographic and decorative arts located at the Parc du Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark in Brussels, Belgium. The museum is one of the constituent parts of the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH) and is one of the largest art museums in Europe. It was formerly called the Cinquantenaire Museum until 2018. It is served by the metro stations Schuman and Merode on lines 1 and 5.
Military forces of the Ottoman Empire used a variety of weapons throughout the centuries. The armoury in Topkapı Palace has a large collection of which it shows select items.
Fatimid art refers to artifacts and architecture from the Fatimid Caliphate (909–1171), an empire based in Egypt and North Africa. The Fatimid Caliphate was initially established in the Maghreb, with its roots in a ninth-century Shia Ismailist Many monuments survive in the Fatimid cities founded in North Africa, starting with Mahdia, on the Tunisian coast, the principal city prior to the conquest of Egypt in 969 and the building of al-Qahira, the "City Victorious", now part of modern-day Cairo. The period was marked by a prosperity amongst the upper echelons, manifested in the creation of opulent and finely wrought objects in the decorative arts, including carved rock crystal, lustreware and other ceramics, wood and ivory carving, gold jewelry and other metalware, textiles, books and coinage. These items not only reflected personal wealth, but were used as gifts to curry favour abroad. The most precious and valuable objects were amassed in the caliphal palaces in al-Qahira. In the 1060s, following several years of drought during which the armies received no payment, the palaces were systematically looted. The libraries largely destroyed, precious gold objects melted down, with a few of the treasures dispersed across the medieval Christian world. Afterwards Fatimid artifacts continued to be made in the same style, but were adapted to a larger populace using less precious materials.
Battoulah, also called Gulf Burqa, is a metallic-looking fashion mask traditionally worn by Muslim Arab women. The mask is mainly worn in the Persian Gulf region, including Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Iraq and Qatar, as well as in southern Iran. The mask usually indicates that the wearer is married. Historically, it was also used to fool enemies into thinking that the women they spied from a distance were actually men.
Jabriya District is one of the districts of Hawalli Governorate in Kuwait.
Edmund Robert Anthony de Unger was a Hungarian-born property developer and art collector. In London he built up the Keir Collection, one of the greatest post-war collections of Islamic art, bequeathed in 2008 to the Pergamon Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The arrangement for the museum to curate the collection came to an end in July 2012. The collection is now hosted by the Dallas Museum of Art as of May 2014 for a 15-year renewable loan.
The Blue Quran is an early Quranic manuscript written in Kufic script. The dating, location of origin, and patron of the Blue Quran are unknown and have been the subject of academic debate, though it is generally accepted that the manuscript was produced in the late 9th to mid 10th-century in either Kairouan, Tunisia or Cordoba in Umayyad Spain. The manuscript is among the most famous works of Islamic calligraphy, notable for its gold lettering on a rare indigo-colored parchment.
Raqqa ware or Rakka ware is a style of lustreware pottery that was a mainstay of the economy of Raqqa in northeastern Syria during the Ayyubid dynasty. Though the ceramics were varied in character, they have been identified during the 20th century by on-site excavations that securely linked the highly sought-after surviving pieces to Raqqa. However, Raqqa was not the only production site and Raqqa Ware has been found at various locations on the Euphrates, such as Qala'at Balis. The pieces typically have a white body covered in siliceous glaze, with decorations in brown luster or blue and back underglaze. The glazes most often vary in both transparency and shades of turquoise, however other colors were also used. Raqqa ware typically consists of kitchen items such as jars, dishes, and bowls with basic shapes that served everyday purposes such as storage. Some sculptural figures exist, and though their original purpose is debated, they are thought to be toys or decorations for the home.
Jehan Rajab was a Brazil-born Kuwaiti author of British origin. She stayed in Kuwait from 1959 before she wrote her book titled Invasion Kuwait: An English Woman's Tale which was an account of life in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait from her own point of view and married Tareq Rajab in 1955 in England who was the 5th Kuwaiti to marry a western woman & the 1st Kuwaiti to go abroad to study Art and archeology. In accordance with Kuwait law, through her marriage she was able to gain Kuwaiti citizenship. She worked as the first director of the department of antiquities and museums of Kuwait. Jehan stayed in Jamaica, Portugal, and the Cape Varde Island during her childhood. She had 3 children including Dr. Ziad Rajab who is the current director of the New English School. She had a hard time settling in Kuwait due to the lack of facilities and found it harder to adjust to the cool winter than hot summers. She co-founded the Tareq Rajab Museum and The New English school with her husband in 1980 and 1969 respectively. Jehan also appeared in a documentary called Class of 1990. She died on 5 April 2015 at the age of 81. Her funeral took place in Jabriya.
Dar al Athar al Islamiyyah is a cultural organization operating several cultural centers in Kuwait.
Arabic miniatures are small paintings on paper, usually book or manuscript illustrations but also sometimes separate artworks that occupy entire pages. The earliest example dates from around 690 AD, with a flourishing of the art from between 1000 and 1200 AD in the Abbasid caliphate. The art form went through several stages of evolution while witnessing the fall and rise of several Islamic caliphates. Arab miniaturists absorbed Chinese and Persian influences brought by the Mongol destructions, and at last, got totally assimilated and subsequently disappeared due to the Ottoman occupation of the Arab world. Nearly all forms of Islamic miniatures owe their existences to Arabic miniatures, as Arab patrons were the first to demand the production of illuminated manuscripts in the Caliphate, it wasn't until the 14th century that the artistic skill reached the non-Arab regions of the Caliphate.
The Khalili Collections are eight distinct art collections assembled by Nasser D. Khalili over five decades. Together, the collections include some 35,000 works of art, and each is considered among the most important in its field.
The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art includes 28,000 objects documenting Islamic art over a period of almost 1400 years, from 700 AD to the end of the twentieth century. It is the largest of the Khalili Collections: eight collections assembled, conserved, published and exhibited by the British-Iranian scholar, collector and philanthropist Nasser David Khalili, each of which is considered among the most important in its field. Khalili's collection is one of the most comprehensive Islamic art collections in the world and the largest in private hands.
