The story
From the Lake Gardens of Kuala Lumpur, the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia is easy to pick out by its turquoise domes. Iranian tile-makers covered its entrance, shaped like an iwan, the great vaulted portal of Persian mosques, in glazed tilework framing a verse from the Qur'an, and the domes follow Central Asian traditions of dome building. The museum is an initiative of the Albukhary Foundation, a Malaysian charitable foundation, and it opened in December 1998.
Inside, more than 7,000 objects fill 12 permanent galleries over two floors. Some galleries are arranged by material, with Qur'an manuscripts, arms and armour, jewellery, coins, metalwork, woodwork, textiles and ceramics. Others follow regions, so India, China and the Malay world each have their own. In the Chinese gallery there is porcelain with Arabic inscriptions, made for Muslim patrons. In the architecture gallery, scale models of great mosques and mausoleums from across the Islamic world stand side by side.
The museum's best-known exhibit is a whole room. It is an early 19th-century Ottoman reception room, complete and restored, and its painted wooden panelling has also served the museum's conservators as a case study in caring for such interiors in a tropical climate.
