Museum of Islamic Art

Located in the heart of Cairo The Museum of Islamic Art after eight years of renovation and reorganization of the collection has recently reopened. With a new display including approximately 1700 objects, the museum is still one of the most important and largest collections on the subject in the world. Moved here in 1903 from its original home at the Fatimd Mosque of al-Hakim, this building is of tremendous importance as it is the oldest building purposefully built to display Islamic art.

The collection was accumulated from various sources: excavations, purchases, gifts and important Islamic monuments in Cairo. Consequently, the museum owns an impressive ceramics, textiles, metalwork, carved wood and stone artifacts that illustrate the material culture of Egypt from the 7th - 19th centuries, as well as the largest group of enameled and gilded Mamluk mosque lamps in the world. Previously arranged by material, the new scenario takes a chronological approach, beginning with the Umayyads, continuing with the Abbasid/Tulunid, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods. The second half of the tour includes artifacts from Ottoman Turkey, Persia and al-Andalus, as well as thematic sections, such as funerary art, epigraphy, calligraphy, carpets and textiles, geometry and astronomy and medicine.