Resplendent rebirth by a Grandson’s hand

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The first museum of Islamic art and culture in the region, the Tareq Rajab Museum houses a magnificent, world-renowned collection assembled exclusively by Tareq Sayed Rajab and his wife, Jehan. This private museum opened in 1980, a hidden jewel tucked away on a side street in the residential area of Jabriya.

The museum’s founders have passed away; Jehan in 2015 and Tareq a year later, both at the age of 81. Their descendants inherited a remarkable legacy that is equally precious and challenging.

Curating such a remarkable collection obviously involves a tremendous investment of time and human and financial resources. The founders’ sons, Ziad and Nadr, serve as the museum’s administrators while their sister Nur does photographic archiving. But who would take over the museum’s custodianship in the future had long posed a weighty question.

Enter on the scene Nadr’s twenty-six-year-old son Tareq: a Master’s degree holder from Cardiff University, qualified bioarchaeologist, and namesake of the museum’s founder. In 2021 he began his professional involvement with the museum by revamping the website and Instagram, but soon moved on to the colossal undertaking of renovating the entire museum premises and curating the collection. Daunting is the word that immediately springs to mind when envisioning the enormity and complexity of this task.

The collection includes more than 30,000 artifacts personally acquired by Jehan and Tareq Rajab during a sixty-year period of travels around the globe. Some 10,000 of these items had been put on permanent display including Islamic manuscripts, ethnic silver jewelry, gold jewelry, ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles and costumes, musical instruments, orientalist art, and Islamic arms and armor.

Forty-three years after its opening, the museum needed an overhaul. The building had not been purpose-built to house a modern museum and with limited space one of the biggest challenges was how to showcase as many artifacts as possible while keeping them organized and tidy for optimum viewing.

Tareq Nadr Rajab took a courageous and comprehensive approach to this herculean job. Standing at the entrance to the museum he begins outlining some of the work he has done. This includes removing thousands of artifacts from their showcases and researching and writing new captions for every item as well as providing more extensive information. After the captions and texts were translated into Arabic they were painstakingly edited by Tareq’s uncle, Dr Ziad. The captions are now clearly printed on long-lasting Perspex rather than a card.

Tareq replaced all the background material in the display cases, carefully selecting textures and colors that would show off the artifacts to their best advantage. He also completely redesigned many display cases, redesigned and rebuilt ceilings and walls, and reorganized the grouping of subject matter in the museum. In cases of overcrowding and repetition of too many similar artifacts, he eliminated some of them while adding other noteworthy artifacts that hadn’t previously been on display.

Finally, he repositioned or remounted each and every artifact, some in their original layout and many in attractive new configurations that allow for better viewing. Tareq also had LED lights installed in the museum. LED lights emit less UV radiation than conventional lighting so they prevent discoloration, fading, and other forms of damage to art and artifacts. They produce better lighting quality so details of the artifacts are more visible, and they reduce energy consumption. For Tareq, investing many thousands of hours in these tasks has been a privilege. “This project is my passion so I don’t consider it work,” he says. “Besides, what kind of man would I be if I didn’t take this opportunity to help preserve my grandparent’s legacy?’ And what a fabulous legacy it is! Tareq’s grandparents made lengthy road trips during the 1960s, exploring Europe, Central Asia, India, Indonesia, and the Arab world.

It was during these journeys that they began collecting artifacts and photographing monuments, people, costumes, and jewelry; everything they believed could be used and exhibited in a museum. While on the road the couple amassed a unique and impressive body of knowledge. Jehan never missed an opportunity to speak to a group of ladies about their embroidery work, their jewelry, or the interesting clothes they were wearing, while Tareq would quietly pull out his sketch pad and pencils to record the visual details of people they met.

Besides being an accomplished artist Tareq was an exceptional photographer, capturing for posterity both foreign places and faces, and the sun-bleached scenes of old Kuwait with his Hasselblad. He published his Kuwait photographs in a number of impressive coffee table books. His talents as a designer and builder are evident in the museum. Jehan incorporated the information she acquired in many of her first-hand interviews, along with much additional research, to produce a number of books about ethnic jewelry, costumes, culture, archaeology, and traditions. In 1969 the couple established the New English School, the first English secondary school in Kuwait, and also worked their entire lives as educators and school administrators.

On the walls of the long stairway just inside the museum entrance, the young Tareq Rajab has added a new exhibit. In text and photographs, it highlights the eventful lives of the museum founders, putting into context this unique and wide-ranging collection and how it was acquired. “In order to appreciate the collection, visitors to the museum really need to understand who my grandparents were,” Tareq remarks. Tareq’s father, Nadr, joins us as we view the exhibit while descending the staircase, the old black and white pictures from the family’s road trips bringing back memories of an unconventional childhood with adventurous parents. Tareq remarks that it was difficult trying to summarise so many eventful decades of his grandparents’ lives in a relatively small exhibit so he has displayed a bar code that can be scanned for more information.

Nadr points out some beautiful calligraphy that adorns wooden panels on the wall at the bottom of the staircase. Carved into mahogany are the names of Jehan and Tareq Sayed Rajab. Tareq Nadr Rajab has obviously inherited his grandparents’ passion for history, art, and antiquities, their love of learning and research, and their very strong work ethic. He also has a natural fl air for aesthetics and design that he has put to remarkable use in the museum renovation. Like his grandfather, Tareq is an archaeologist, albeit one of a new breed. As a bioarchaeologist he analyses human remains in the laboratory in an archaeological context. His particular interest in the respiratory health of past populations culminated in the study of the sinuses of an Early Medieval population from Anglesey in Wales and a Romano-British population in Dorset for his Master’s research. Part of that research involved searching through bags of bone fragments for various types of sinuses and looking into skulls with a loupe to record variations of sinus infections.

Tareq Sayed Rajab had joined Kuwait’s Department of Antiquities and Museums in 1960 and eventually became its Director. From 1960-64, he and Jehan spent the winter and spring months on Failaka Island, excavating Greek and Bronze Age sites with the Danish expedition and turning Sheikh Ahmed Al Jaber’s old summer house into an ethnological museum. Realizing how significant those years were to his grandparents, the young Tareq Rajab included information on their Failaka sojourn in their personal exhibit. A fascination with antique firearms is another common factor between the grandfather and grandson. Tareq leads the way into a newly-designed exhibition that displays a stunning collection of antique rifles, pistols, swords, and other weapons and armor from Islamic cultures all across the world. “One would be hard-pressed to find another collection of Islamic firearms like it and it is certainly unique in the Arabian Gulf,” Tareq notes. When he began inspecting the collection, Tareq was intrigued by the beauty, artistry, and craftsmanship of the items, as well as the story of the technological developments of firearms across the Islamic world.

Immersing himself in the subject, he also researched how to carry out museum quality conservation of the weapons. “There are lots of resources online on the conservation of antique firearms, swords, and daggers. So I was able to apply these methods to clean these items, as well as some chainmail shirts and steel plates, removing any active rust without removing the patina, and put everything in good order,” he says. “By spending so much time with the objects I really developed an intimate relationship with them and felt I was bringing them back to life. Out of an original total of 170 firearms, I chose 80 that were the most beautiful and noteworthy to display.” Nadr points out that while such work is incredibly painstaking and time-consuming, being so closely involved with antique artifacts is a unique experience. “How many people in the world would have the opportunity to actually handle such old pieces?” he says, while Tareq nods in agreement.

In addition to writing new extended captions for the items, Tareq produced display panels describing the anatomy of guns, the history of gunpowder, and the evolution of antique firearms. “I’m writing a general history of the items in every exhibition room. I don’t like just having basic descriptions of things with the date and place they were made. I want people to have the option to read more if they’re interested,” he says. Tareq leads the way into the exhibition rooms containing textiles and costumes. He notes that there are almost 5,000 textiles in the museum collection, including some 1,000 costumes. With limited space, displaying all of them was not an option. The process of elimination was incredibly difficult but Tareq managed to curate an extremely attractive and interesting exhibition of textiles and costumes representative of cultures across the Islamic world. The same holds true for the collection of ethnic silver jewelry, another field that was of particular interest to Jehan Rajab along with textiles.

The jewelry includes amulets, ankle bells, gem-encrusted belt buckles, ceremonial headpieces, bedouin jewelry, massive 19th century Turkoman pieces, and an 18th-century Tibetan sorcerer’s breastpiece carved out of human bones, to name just a few examples. “My grandmother always wanted to display everything, but the showcases were so overcrowded, it was impossible to properly appreciate all the pieces,” Tareq says. As with the textiles, the process of downsizing the amount of jewelry to be put on display was a dilemma and literally became somewhat of a nightmare. Tareq laughs, recalling a bad dream in which he was trapped in a cupboard full of silver jewelry by his grandmother. Ultimately, Tareq’s sharp curator’s eye resulted in a jewelry exhibition that retains the original character of the displays but is even more optically pleasing. Tareq points out a corridor with an exhibition of early nineteenth-century David Robert lithographs, at the end of which is the Gold Room. With a breathtaking display of spectacular antique gold jewelry from around the world, it’s one of Tareq’s favorite exhibition rooms.

Among the treasures are second and third century pieces from the Levant, gem-encrusted neckpieces with fine enamel work from 18th century Mughal India, turquoise decorated pieces from the Arabian peninsula, a gold and turquoise ring that was worn by Dame Violet Dickson, and a gold necklace with Quranic inscriptions that once belonged to the intriguing Princess Selma of Zanzibar. In such cases, when the owner of the jewelry is known, Tareq has displayed their photograph and story along with the item. Tareq pauses at the entrance to the Gold Room to point out the remains of a false wall. It was one of several that had been built to hide the priceless contents of the museum from Iraqi soldiers during their occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91. After reports that the Iraqi forces were coming to loot the museum, Jehan and Nadr had quickly packed away as much of the collection as possible and worked with carpenters to put false doors and facades over most of the display cases. (The rest of the family members were outside of Kuwait when the surprise invasion had occurred.)

They had also placed shiny brass objects and other modern items on display that would hopefully distract the Iraqis and get them off the trail of the actual antique artifacts. Sure enough, on February 20, 1991, the Iraqis arrived at the museum and questioned and threatened Jehan and Nadr for several hours, badly knocking Nadr about. Fortunately, the ruse prepared by Jehan and Nadr was effective and the soldiers didn’t discover any of the precious artifacts, except one. “When I conduct tours of the museum I always tell the story that’s recorded in my grandmother’s book, ‘Invasion Kuwait, An English Woman’s Tale,’” says Tareq. “She recalled how they had forgotten to pack away a precious eighteenth-century gold, enamel and gemstone Mughal necklace and when an Iraqi secret police agent pointed it out and asked if it was gold, my father convinced him that it was only brass.” Tareq remarks that in the Tareq Rajab Museum, history is not just confined to glass showcases but is infused in the very premises. Tareq and Nadr disclose that during the long renovation they faced many challenges. There were leaky pipes, logistic problems, and shortages of both materials and manpower.

They had to order things like LED lights and mannequins from abroad because local suppliers didn’t have enough stock. They found that competent craftsmen, and skilled carpenters in particular, are in short supply. ‘All our cabinets are custom-made by local carpenters. We still have a couple carpenters who were employed by my parents to work in the museum in the ‘70s. But many of the good carpenters were forced to leave Kuwait when they reached the age of 60, so we lost many people with talent and experience,” Nadr laments. Despite the many obstacles they encountered, Tareq and Nadr also embarked on an incredibly ambitious side project: a huge diorama of the Battle of Hattin. Tareq explains that the battle took place on July 4, 1187, between the Crusader states of the Levant and the forces of Sultan Saladin. It was a deciding battle, with the Muslim forces under Saladin defeating the Crusaders and once again becoming the eminent military power in the Holy Land. In fact, so devastating was the defeat that it sent shock waves through Europe, triggering the famous Third Crusade with Richard the Lionheart. A large information board accompanies the diorama so visitors can briefly read about everything from the political climate of the Crusader states to the aftermath and consequences of the battle.

Tareq was inspired by a diorama of the Battle of Agincort which he saw in the Royal Armories in Leeds. “It really captured my imagination. I wanted to make something having to do with Islamic history, and since the Crusades are a particular interest of mine, I chose the Battle of Hattin,” he says. He and his father spent 250 hours constructing the 3.5 meter by 2.6 meter base of the diorama. Tareq then hand-painted 3,500 tiny metal figures of soldiers with their shields, horses, and fl ags. Nadr drilled miniscule holes into the base of all the figures into which he fastened tiny pins so the figures could be mounted onto the base. An Italian artist named Riccardo Scavo painted the realistic looking background. A small window provides an eye-level view of the battlefield while at the press of a button the sounds of battle will ring out. “Of all the things I’ve done in the museum I’m most proud of this diorama and the firearms room,” Tareq says. By the time this article is published the Tareq Rajab Museum will have reopened to the public with its newly-renovated premises. The outcome is an incredible achievement and a labor of love by the grandson of museum founders Jehan and Tareq Rajab, of which they would undoubtedly be extremely proud.

Story and photographs by Claudia Farkas Al Rashoud
Special to the Arab Times

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