Tareq Rajab Museum

About this place

The Tareq Rajab Museum is a private museum of Islamic art in Jabriya, Kuwait, showing a collection built by the Rajab family over about fifty years from the 1950s. It has two nearby sites: the original museum, founded in 1980, and the Museum of Islamic Calligraphy, added in 2007. It is one of the region's richest Islamic art collections, despite its modest halls. Tareq Al-Sayid Rajab began collecting books as a young man. In the 1960s he and his wife Jehan drove across the Middle East, buying from dealers in Damascus and Istanbul and from villages in Syria, Palestine and Iran, keen to keep what rapid modernisation threatened to sweep away. Rajab served as Kuwait's Director of Museums and Antiquities, where the idea of a museum began. The family funds it entirely, and the third generation helps to run it. The halls show ceramics from pre-Islamic times to the early 20th century, metalwork, glass, arms, costumes and textiles, embroidered holy coverings and a notable group of silver and gold jewellery. Among the highlights are Qurans and manuscripts from across the Islamic world, the earliest from the 7th century, and a manuscript of Al-Kindi on optics. You can see it all in under an hour. The museum is 5.5 km from the Scientific Center and 10 km from Souq Al-Mubarakiya in a straight line, so take a taxi. A recent visitor reports that one ticket covers both sites. Hours can change and published times split the day into morning and evening, so call ahead.