July-August 2010

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On 22 November the Emir of Qatar opened Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art. Michael Hall attended this much-anticipated event.

No sooner had the Emir of Qatar unveiled the plaque that marked the official opening of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha than the sky over the museum exploded in a spectacular firework display. Some Qataris in the opening party told me that they were delighted that it was not more spectacular: ‘we don’t want comparisons with Dubai’. Only two days before, the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai had opened amid scenes of near-Bacchanalian extravagance. That is not the Qatari way. There were visiting heads of state and even Robert de Niro at the opening party, but most of the 200 guests were museum directors, curators and art critics. The party took place in semi-darkness illuminated by torches but even so it was easy to spot the distinctively tall form of Henri Loyrette, the Louvre’s director, talking to Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum, who was accompanied by his successor, Thomas P. Campbell.

Most, like me, had not yet seen inside the museum, and were politely desperate to be allowed in. The ceremonies were kept reasonably short, with speeches by the Emir’s daughter (and chair of the museum’s trustees) Sheikha Al-Mayassa, and the museum’s sprightly 91-year-old architect, I.M. Pei. Then, while the Emir was being shown round the collections, the guests were treated to an energetically entertaining concert by the Silk Road Ensemble, a cross-cultural blend of eastern and western instruments and musical traditions, directed by Yo Yo Ma.

That sense of cultural mix is evident in the museum, which has a mission to explain Islamic art and culture to the world in a country that has for centuries been on a major trade route between east and west. Pei’s building – he has said that it will be his last major project – brilliantly exploits the traditional forms of mosque architecture in a distinctive profile of stacked cubes, reminiscent as he points out of such celebrated monuments as the Ahmad ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo. There are also echoes of the Islamic fortresses of northern Africa. At Pei’s insistence, the museum has been built on an artificial island in Doha’s broad bay, linked to the mainland by a causeway. He was concerned to ensure that the museum should never be overwhelmed by the skyscrapers leaping up all over Doha, which is in the process of converting itself from a Gulf version of Nice into a mini-Manhattan by the sea.

The museum’s least successful aspect is the cavernous central hall, which rises the full height of the building, although it may well come into its own when used for events such as the new Tribeca Doha film festival (launched by Robert de Niro at a press conference the day after the museum opened, this will begin in 2009). All doubts are quelled in the galleries themselves. They have been designed by Pei’s former collaborator on his Louvre extension, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who uses a restrained palette of dark brown wood and grey concrete, enlivened by textured surfaces. But the superb lighting renders this setting almost invisible, allowing the objects to appear almost as though suspended in space (the setting may be too invisible – I saw a couple of people crash into glass walls).

Perhaps because the same six or eight objects have been reproduced so many times in the advance publicity for the museum, I was half expecting to find that the large building contained only about only 10 treasures. In fact the collection, numbering around 800 objects, is remarkable for its depth and scope as well as for its very great beauty. The display plays up the aesthetic nature of the collection – most of the objects are presented singly, in individual cases, and the labelling is minimalist almost to a fault. This is essentially a display of ‘masterpiece’ art – as one distinguished British museum director remarked to me, a visitor could leave without having learned very much or indeed anything about Islam as a religion. From that point of view the museum’s mission was better fulfilled by the opening loan exhibition, ‘Beyond Boundaries’, a selection of objects from museums across the world showing how Islam has interacted with other cultures.

A fuller account of the museum will appear in the February 2009 issue of Apollo.

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