Collection
The museum will be dedicated to the acquisition, preservation, display and interpretation of artefacts relating to the intellectual, cultural, artistic and religious traditions of Muslim communities, past and present. Artefacts will include ceramics, metalwork, and paintings covering all periods of Islamic history. Manuscripts in the collection will include the earliest known copy of Avicenna’s Qanun fi’l-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine) dated 1052. A music programme is planned, which will work to expand knowledge of the traditional music of Asia and the Islamic world, as well as their contemporary expression.
The museum will become a repository of historical materials related to the Ismaili community and house research programmes related to each one of the aspects of its institutional mission. It will also provide a space for permanent exchanges between the Islamic and the Western worlds on educational, cultural and socioeconomic issues.
The collection, which comprises some 1,000 pieces, includes several superb examples of Qur'an manuscripts that demonstrate the variety of script, media and decorative styles that evolved in the Muslim world. Among them, an eighth century North African folio demonstrates the earliest style of kufic script written on parchment. A page from the well known Blue Qur'an provides an example of gold kufic script on indigo-dyed parchment. The Blue Qur'an is considered one of the most extraordinary Qur'an manuscripts ever created; its origins are 9th-tenth century North African, and it was likely created for the Fatimid imam-caliphs ruling from Qayrawan.
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Famous quotes containing the word collection:
“We’ll never know the worth of water till the well go dry.”
—18th-century Scottish proverb, collected in James Kelly, Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs, no. 351 (1721)
“What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong.”
—Norman Douglas (1868–1952)
“The society would permit no books of fiction in its collection because the town fathers believed that fiction ‘worketh abomination and maketh a lie.’”
—For the State of Rhode Island, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)