On 24 Jan 2014 at 6.30 am, a car bomb exploded outside the Cairo Islamic Art Museum – the largest such museum in the world.
The museum holds 100,000 objects including the oldest known example of Kufic script, on a tombstone dated AH.31; a Quran dated AH.203; two of the 12 gold dinars which are the oldest extant coins with Arabic script; and the oldest known key of the kaaba.
The front entrance of the museum was destroyed, with multiple ceilings coming down, a lighting column blown thirty metres into the museum, and 43 out of the 63 showcases damaged beyond repair. Of the 1471 objects on display, 165 were damaged but reported as restorable, while 16 have been ‘destroyed’. Glass objects were especially prone to damage – partly because of their intrinsic fragility, and partly because of their position near the entrance.
Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed, the textile curator at the Museum, spoke movingly at SOAS this week of seeing the damage – “we cried like rain” – and of the local team pulling together to wrap and move the objects to safer rooms.
Unfortunately, several important points weren’t clarified in the talk, or in the subsequent questions.
Three of the destroyed objects were, as the speaker said, “masterpieces”: the mosque lamps from the 14th century complex of Sultan Hassan. While the curator was very certain that these have been destroyed, it was pointed out that three remarkably similar objects had recently appeared on the art market.
Then, although it is touching that all of the restorations were performed by local staff, at least one of the restorations we were shown – of a delicate stucco window – seemed perhaps more of a clumsy re-making than a rigorous restoration.
I was left not understanding how the Islamic Art Museum and the rest of the Antiquities service joined up. For example, it is surely surprising that the official website for the Islamic Art Museum – a sub-section on the overall Antiquities website – doesn’t even mention the bomb. And I think that various international agencies did offer to help with restoration.
‘Persiana’ is the best cookbook of 2014 – and its only partly because Persian food is the Best Food all the time! Read more here.
The second blog this week isn’t quite as cheery – reporting on how staff ‘cried like rain’ when they saw the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, after a bomb devastated it.
Cook, don’t cry – that’s my advice and hope!