The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art includes 26,000 objects documenting Islamic art over a period of almost 1400 years, from 700 CE to the end of the twentieth century. It is the largest of the Khalili Collections: eight collections assembled, conserved, published and exhibited by the British scholar, collector and philanthropist Nasser David Khalili, each of which is considered among the most important in its field. Khalili's collection is one of the most comprehensive Islamic art collections in the world and the largest in private hands.
In addition to copies of the Quran, and rare and illustrated manuscripts, the collection includes album and miniature paintings, lacquer, ceramics, glass and rock crystal, metalwork, arms and armour, jewellery, carpets and textiles, over 15,000 coins, and architectural elements. The collection includes folios from manuscripts with Persian miniatures, including the Great Mongol Shahnameh, the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, and the oldest manuscript of world history the Jamiʿ al-tawarikh. Among its collections of arms and armour is a 13th-century gold saddle from the time of Genghis Khan.
The ceramic collection, numbering around 2,000 items, has been described as particularly strong in blue and white pottery of the Timurid era and also pottery of pre-Mongol Bamiyan. The jewellery collection includes more than 600 rings. Around 200 objects relate to medieval Islamic science and medicine, including astronomical instruments for orienting towards Mecca, tools, scales, weights, and "magic bowls" intended for medical use. Among the scientific instruments are a celestial globe made in 1285–6 and a 17th-century astrolabe commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.
Exhibitions drawing exclusively from the collection have been held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam as well as at many other museums and institutions worldwide. An exhibition at the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi in 2008 was, at the time, the largest exhibition of Islamic art ever held.
The Wall Street Journal has described it as the greatest collection of Islamic Art in existence. According to Edward Gibbs, Chairman of Middle East and India at Sotheby's, it is the best such collection in private hands.
Khalili Collections
Based in the UK and originally from Iran, Nasser David Khalili has assembled eight distinct art collections, each considered among the most important in its field. In total, they include 35,000 objects. He began collecting Islamic art in 1970. Private collections usually focus on either collecting complete series of objects or on selecting those of the highest aesthetic quality; Khalili's collection combines both traditions. The collection of Islamic art is one of two focused on Islam, along with the Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage. Islamic enamels also appear in the Khalili Collection of Enamels of the World. While collecting Islamic art, Khalili encountered damascening, in which gold and silver decoration is pressed into an iron surface; this led him to acquire a separate collection of Spanish damascened metalwork.
In addition to collecting, conserving, publishing and exhibiting the collection, Khalili has funded the creation of a research centre in Islamic art at the University of Oxford as well as the first university chair in the subject, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His own publications include a history of Islamic art and architecture which has been published in four languages. Khalili has described Islamic art as "the most beautiful and diverse art". His stated aim is to use art and culture "to create good will between the West and the Muslim world."
Objects in the collection Qurans
The collection of complete Qurans and individual folios includes 98 from before 1000 CE, 56 from 1000 to 1400, 60 from 1400 to 1600, and more than 150 from after 1600. It was described by the historian Robert Irwin as "one of the largest and most representative collections of Quranic manuscripts in the world" and is the largest private collection. Among the earliest objects in the collection are some complete examples with their original bindings. The collection has an individual folio from the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, one of the very oldest surviving Quran manuscripts. There are two folios from the 10th-century Blue Quran, the only surviving Quran on indigo-dyed vellum. Other early Quran manuscripts include two quires (bound groups of folios) from the Palermo Quran, a single folio from the Isfahan Quran, both from the 10th century, and a single folio from the Samarkand Kufic Quran, also called the Tashkent Quran, from the 8th or 9th century.
A section of a 13th-century Quran bears the signature of calligrapher Yaqut al-Musta'simi, regarded as one of the greats of classical Quranic calligraphy. An exceptionally large single-volume Quran dated to 1552 CE was in the Mughal imperial library during the reigns of Aurangzeb and Shah 'Alam, bearing their seals. It is thought to have been commissioned by Shah Tahmasp. An 18th-century single-volume Quran, the work of calligrapher Mahmud Celaleddin Efendi, was previously owned by Ottoman princess Nazime Sultan.
Illustrated manuscripts and miniature paintings
The illustrated manuscripts in the collection include complete copies and detached folios from Iran, India and Turkey. There are several complete exemplars or folios of the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), the national epic poem of Iran, whose text and illustrations combine historical and mythical material. These include ten illustrated folios from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp (circa 1520), four from the late 16th century Eckstein Shahnameh, and one of 57 surviving folios of the Great Mongol Shahnameh (circa 1330s).
There are several exemplars of the Khamsa of Nizami, which comprises five epic poems. A diwan (volume of collected poetry) of the 14th-century poet Hafez is dated AH 924 (1567–8 AD) with illuminated two paintings. Among many detached folios from Iran, especially 17th-century Isfahan, are works by Reza Abbasi, Mo'en Mosavver, Mohammad Zaman, Aliquli Jabbadar, and Shaykh 'Abbasi. A 15th-century exemplar of the Masnavi, a poem by the scholar and mystic Rumi, is illuminated in ink, watercolour, and gold. The folios from 15th-century Ottoman Turkey include two from a Siyer-i Nebi (a biography of Prophet Muhammed) commissioned by Sultan Murad III. Some folios are from works of dynastic or global history, including two from the earliest surviving illustrated exemplar of the Zafarnama by Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, from 1436 AD. There is a section from the oldest manuscript of the Jami' al-tawarikh, Rashid al-Din's world history; the other surviving section of the same manuscript is in Edinburgh University Library. A painting from the Padshanamah (chronicle of the king's reign) shows Shah Jahan, with family and courtiers, watching two elephants fighting.
Among the 76 Indian paintings are many commissioned by the Mughal emperors. They include two folios from a Ramayana that Akbar commissioned for his mother and one folio from the Akbar Hamzanama, a large illustrated manuscript of the Hamzanama also commissioned by Akbar. There are two illustrated folios from the autobiography of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire.
Other manuscripts
Other manuscripts include a lavishly illuminated exemplar of part one of Al-Shifa bi Ta'rif Huquq al-Mustafa (a detailed commentary on the life and character of Muhammed) from the 17th-century Moroccan royal court. A manuscript of Tuhfah al-Saʿdiyyah, a commentary on Ibn Sina's medical text The Canon of Medicine, dates from the 14th century. A 14th-century diwan of the poet Al-Mutanabbi is illuminated to the highest standards of that period.
Calligraphy
The 174 items of calligraphy include hilyes (verbal portraits of the Muhammed), ijazat (licences allowing the holder to transmit protected knowledge), muraqqa'at (albums of calligraphy), and siyah mashq (calligraphic practice sheets). The calligraphers include Yaqut al-Musta'simi, known for refining and codifying six basic calligraphic styles of Arabic script, and others influenced by him, as well as the Sultans Abdulmejid I and Mahmud II. The bulk of the collection comes from Ottoman Turkey from the 17th to the 19th centuries. One album of calligraphy contains pieces signed by the scribes of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Metalwork
The 1,000 metalwork objects in the collection cover the period from the 6th century to the early 20th century. They come from across the Islamic world, especially Iran, the Jazira (in present-day Syria and Iraq), and 17th- and 18th-century India. The objects include bowls, incense burners, and ewers. Brass and bronze are common materials. Metalworkers in 12th- and 13th-century Iran made vessels and incense burners in the shape of birds and animals, and the collection includes several examples. The objects' decorations range from arabesque patterns to inscriptions and to figurative art.
Although it is rare in Islamic metalwork for artists to sign or date their pieces, several objects in the collection have signed names or dates. Some bear the names of patrons; for example, a 14th-century silver-inlaid brass bowl bears the name of Al-Nasir Muhammad, a 13th-century Mamluk Sultan. A brass casket from early 13th-century Jazira, lavishly inlaid with silver, has four numeric dials; these formed part of a combination lock whose mechanism is now missing.
Jewellery The jewellery in the collection numbers almost 600 personal adornments, plus more than 600 rings and 200 luxury items from the royal workshops of the Mughal Empire. Together this is the most comprehensive published collection of Islamic jewellery. The adornments include almost every kind—from bracelets and amulets to buttons and brooches—from the 7th century onward. They are decorated with gems, enamel, or niello. The collection's Fatimid objects have the "rope and grain" filigree style characteristic of Egypt or Syria. The Mughal objects include a ruby engraved with the names of emperors Shah Jahan and Jahangir. A box from 17th-century Mughal India consists of 103 engraved emeralds in a gold frame, topped by a faceted diamond. Most of the enamelled gold objects made for the Mughal court are now in the Iranian crown jewels or in the Hermitage Museum in Russia; an exception is an octagonal box in the Khalili collection that dates from around 1700. A hookah bowl from 18th-century Mewar in India is made of gold with colourful enamel decoration. A gold badge, collar and star, constituting the Order of the Lion and the Sun, is decorated with enamels and precious stones. It was presented by Fath-Ali Shah Qajar of Iran to the British diplomat John Macdonald Kinneir.
Very few Islamic rings had been documented before Khalili published his collection of 618. Whereas some rings are purely decorative, many function as signet rings while others have religious inscriptions intended to give protection to the wearer. Art historian Marian Wenzel used the collection as the basis for a typology of Islamic rings.
Arms and armour
The collection's arms and armour range from the 7th century to the 19th. There are belt fittings that express military rank, and multiple chanfrons (masks for protecting horse's faces). Two sets of horse trappings from the 13th and 14th centuries include a complete gold saddle. A 15th-century iron and steel war mask is decorated with engravings. Describing the arms and armour catalogue, James W. Allan, Professor of Eastern Art at the University of Oxford, wrote "The range of pieces [...] is quite extraordinary: a 1.8 m long seventeenth-century Indian cannon, Turkish and Persian daggers with astonishingly beautiful enamelled handles and scabbards, gold fittings for a 10th-century Chinese saddle, a Moroccan horse-shoe etc."