The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art includes 28,000 objects documenting Islamic art over a period of almost 1400 years, from 700 AD 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-Iranian 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."
