 Good evening, everybody. Good evening. We have a feast of a lecture this evening, so I'm going to try to start on time. Welcome to SOAS. My name is Scott Redford. I am the Nasr Di Khalili Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology and the convener of the Islamic Art Circle. And as you know, this lecture is part of one of our series. During turn time, the Islamic Art Circle brings lectures on Islamic art to SOAS. And Professor Khalili kindly supports the Islamic Art Circle by sponsoring an annual lecture in memory of his parents, for which we are very grateful. It's an honor to be welcoming David Khalili here this evening. He will be discussing, of course, the art of collecting. Professor Khalili, as many of you will know, is a world-renowned scholar, collector, and philanthropist who has been called the cultural ambassador of Islam by leaders of Muslim countries. Since 1970, he has assembled eight of the world's finest and most comprehensive art collections, Islamic art, Hajj and the Arts of the Pilgrimage, Aramaic documents, Japanese art of the Meiji period, Japanese kimonos, Swedish textiles, Spanish damocene metalwork, and enamels of the world. Together, the eight collections comprise some 35,000 works of art. The Khalili collections will be fully represented in a series of 88 books, including exhibition catalogs, of which 70 have already been published. These eight collections have been shown in over 40 major museums worldwide. Furthermore, the Khalili collections have been major contributors to more than 50 international exhibitions. Selections from the eight collections have been exhibited in museums such as the British Museum, the Victorian Albert Museum, the Hermitage and St. Petersburg, the Alhambra Palace in Grenada, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the list goes on. David Khalili is a graduate, associate research professor, and honorary fellow of the University of London, and was the longest-serving governor of our university. In the early 1990s, he was solely responsible for securing 10 million pounds from his friend, His Majesty the Sultan of Brunei, to build this magnificent building in which you find yourselves this evening. He is also an honorary fellow of Wilson College, a member of the Chancellor's Court of Benefactors University of Oxford. And in 2003, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Boston University. In May 2005, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts in London. At Oxford, David Khalili has sponsored the foundation and the running of the Khalili Research Center for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East. Professor Khalili has been awarded many other honors, including trustee of the city of Jerusalem. And in 2007, the high sheriff of Greater London Award for his cultural contribution to London. He is exceptional in having received knighthoods from two popes. His Holiness the late Pope John Paul II honored him as Knight of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Sylvester. And his Holiness Pope Benedict the 16th further elevated him to Knight Commander in the same order for his work in the pursuit of peace, education, and culture amongst nations. In 2012, he was further honored in this field by UNESCO by being made a goodwill ambassador. In 2014, he was the recipient of the Laureate of the Dialogue of Cultures Award of the French National Assembly. And in early 2016, he was awarded the rank of officier in the Audre Nationale de la Légion d'Honneur by the French President François Hollande at the Elisée Palace. Thank you for your patience, and I would now like to pass you over to our special, very special guest speaker at tonight's Islamic Art Circle Lecture. Please join me in welcoming Professor David Khalili. Thank you very much, Scott. And thank you for your very generous introduction. I just wish that my day parents were here to hear it too. They are very old fashioned in a way we run our life. And in the world of collecting, I always considered myself never ever as owner, but only as a temporary custodian. Because at the end of the day, the ownership is nothing but a myth. When I started to collect, I realized that religion and politics always have their own languages. But the language of art is universal. This universality penetrates its message through the heart and mind of people. It is the best and probably the most secret weapon we have against today's world, which is extremely complex. Nobody can label you to correct something. Nobody ever label you to be a contributor. Nobody would ever accuse you to do something which is contribute to humanity and adds something and takes a bit of pain from the world that we live in today. We are living in a world of mass information full of misinformation. And this is the problem that the politics and the religion have, but art does not have that problem. What I'm going to do tonight is to run you through what we have done for the last 45 years. Why I collected the Islamic art? Why I collected hajj, material belonging to hajj? As we go through, I try to put you on a fast track. You don't expect me to talk about 35,000 pieces in 45 minutes or one hour, obviously not. But I have cherry-picked certain pieces would somehow have a voice as ambassador of that section, be it Islamic or a hajj or the other collections. The word collector is a very tall order. People take this very loosely. I always say that to be respected as a collector, you have to collect, you have to conserve, you have to research, you have to publish, and you have to exhibit your holding. Because if you don't fulfill these five criterias, you're not really doing anything for anybody. There are many selfish collectors around. And there are only few that share their passion with the public. From time to time, I'm asked by friends that I live in the past. And I kindly turn around to them and say, no, I don't. I don't live in the past. I live with the past. Because we can learn tremendous amount from the past. So I'm going to run through. Here you see the eight collections as you go from left to right. Islamic, hajj, Aramaic, Japanese, Kimono, Swedish textile, Spanish metalwork. And the last one is in Amel of the World. Islamic starts from the time that Prophet Muhammad was given the revelation in Makkah. He was born in 570. And he was chosen to be given the revelation when he was 30 years old. Majority of these revelation came through written messages that you see. These are the earliest one. Obviously, the word of God that was revealed to the Prophet never changed in his content. But in form, it did change. And you see it as we go along. These are the earliest. This page is one of the earliest that we know. There are not many around, but you see it in some of major museums here and there. It's called Maya because the writing goes through the left. Kufic was written on different type of vellum, blue, gold on white, pink, and on white. So sometime you see a vellum page, and you realize that on one side, the writing has stayed very firmly, but on the other side is fading. The reason is very simple because they use the skin. And the side of the skin that hair was growing is the side that somehow have more penetration of the ink. And the other side is very smooth. So that is why sometime you see on one side it's a bit faded, and on the other side it's not. So here I'm showing you four different type of Kufic writing. There are not many complete Kufic corrals around. We bought this in 1980 at Christie's, I think it was. It's completely small, but it's a complete Kufic Koran. It's, I think, missing one page. I was talking to Jeremy just beforehand, wondering where are the other complete Kufic Korans. And except in Egypt and in Morocco and I think in Mashhad in Iran, there are not that many. I think we could count them on our two hands when it comes to the small Kufic Korans. Here I decided to bring you a little story and show you a story of Timon Tamelein, who in the 14th century, early 15th century, decided to challenge his calligrapher. And he told him, why don't you surprise me? Write a Koran. So Omar Akhtar, who apparently, legend says, he was left-handed, surprised Timur and walked in with a Koran which was as small as it could take the place of the stone on his ring. So he looks at him and says, all right, I reward you, but I challenge you now to go and write the biggest Koran in the world. He goes back and the story says that he walked in after a couple of years and brought the Koran on a virbalo, virbalo into his palace. The line you see upstairs is one line from the main seven line pages that exist. And the one on the bottom is a copy that was made probably in 19th century. We are very lucky to have two pages. So that is how the pages looked. And on the top, that is the pages that you see. This is from the main pages that was written during that period. I made a small discovery when I was in Washington. I went to see the Koran exhibition at Washington. It's a fantastic exhibition. And I realized that the stand for that Koran still exists in the mosque in San Al-Ghant. And the photographer was there. So I asked Julian to take a photograph and share it with you today. So that is the stand that was made for that Koran. Apparently it was photographed in 1659 by a photographer. I didn't have the name, but at least now you know that this is the stand that held that huge Koran. There are not many royal Koran that has been commissioned by royal king. What you see here is the Koran commissioned by Shah Tahmas. And we are extremely lucky to have his royal seal with it. The story goes that, and by the way, it does have the handwriting of Shah Jahan because it ended up to be in his library in India. So the Moghul and the Persians at the time were very close to each other. You shouldn't forget that almost simultaneously there were three Islamic kingdoms, which were the Persians, the Ottomans, and the Moghuls simultaneously. And they were very close to each other. So this was given by Shah Tahmas to one of the rulers. It's written in gold throughout. And the Surah headings are in Laji Vardina. In Iran, the Qajars decided that they want to take that to a next level. As I said, the content of the Koran never changed. But the writing, the illumination, and the way, and the shape, and the size, and the way it was written in different type. Mouhaqa, Naskh, the Nastali, so there were different type of Koranic writing. So the illumination during that period, during the Qajar period, was immense. This is probably the largest Qajar Koran that I know of. I brought this to show you for a simple reason. This is the royal Koran written by the daughter of Zorak Zeeb, the son of Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan himself was very secular. I'll come to it in a minute later. But Zorak Zeeb was extremely, his son was extremely, extremely devout to Islam. And the daughters were even more devoted to Islam. This Koran is written by Zorak Zeeb's daughter. The reason I wanted to share it with you is there are some wrong impression about the role of women in Islam. It's not really the fact. Muslims, women were very respected in every period of history. Even in Hadith, there is a story that even Prophet himself used to ask his wife Khadija from time to time to ask him advice about what was going on in the household. So the role of the woman was extremely important in Islam. And from time to time, I always say that the world population is almost 7 billion, almost half a woman and half of man. You should always remember that the mother of one half are the ladies. I was talking about different types of Korans. So I chose four Korans here for you to see. First of all, to see the different period and different type of writing. The first one is in three lines. The second one is one of two Jews that we know written by Yavut al-Mustasami, the great calligrapher of Baghdad. It's signature saying Katabahu b-Madinat Ar-Salam, which is Baghdad, and it's dated 1282. It's funny that almost 15 years later, in 1298, he died. But the story about him, and that's why I chose that Koran, is very interesting. Because when the Mongols in 1258 invaded Baghdad, they knew about Yavut. And the Mongols at the time wanted to make sure that they captured him. So they told the soldiers, make sure that you captured him alive. We don't want you to kill him. So capture him and bring him alive. So the soldier used to go house to house and ask where Yavut was. And each time they said, who is Yavut al-Mustasami? Everybody put his hand up, because they wanted to be saved. So in a very direct way, he saved a lot of life. So that's the legend. The one on the bottom is the Spanish Koran. This is one of the late acquisition. We bought it about six, seven years ago. With the admission of all my friends, who I meet, from time to time, they come to our center to look at our new acquisition. It's probably one of the finest Spanish Korans in the world. And the one on the right is the Mamluk Koran from Egypt. But the beauty of it is that it's written throughout in gold. You very rarely see Mamluk Korans. We have many Korans in our correction. We have about 600 Korans that covers geographically every major center of Muslim world, all the 53 Muslim countries. But what is important here is Koran and the Ayat and the verses that was revealed to the Prophet is about 6,240. It is divided into 114 chapters. The person who was responsible for the Koran the way that we see it today was the third caliph, not Abu Bakr, not Omar, it was Usman, who decided to take all the revelation that was gathered and put them in a form we see today. There is a lot of discussion about that. We call Prophet Muhammad was in Makkah for 10 years. So the revelation that was given to him are called Makki, Ayah. And when he left and went to Medina for 13 years, the revelation in Medina are called Madani. That means it comes from Medina. But what is important about the whole story is that the Usman decided to put the Koran the way we see it today. He used not the way that the revelation was given to Prophet Muhammad. He used mostly the Medina revelation, which were longer. And he used the shorter ones, which was given to Prophet in Makkah toward the end of the Koran. That's why when you look at the Koran, at the end of the Koran, you see a lot of surah heading illumination. This is because the short ones end the dub at the end. So the positioning of all the revelation was done by Usman. But the content stayed the same. And you see the changes in a form of illumination as we go along. The story of this piece is very interesting. There was always a question that there is a Shah Jahan album, which is mostly miniatures. Because as I said, he was very secular. But his son, Aurangzeb, he put his father in jail in actual fact, was extremely, extremely, extremely devout to Islam. So the story was that he asked one of his librarians to make an album for him of very special pages or saying or passages or ayat from Koran. So this album was prepared for him. It's absolutely magnificent. The pages are fully illuminated. I was in India. And I was having a tour of Taj Mahan. And there was a guy who was with us. And I asked him, we know about the Shah Jahan album of miniatures. But we don't know about the album. Do you know anything about him, Aurangzeb, having an album? He said, no, this is all stories. I came back from London. I was sitting behind my desk. It was a rainy day. And a good friend of mine who I bought a lot of objects from Oliver Ho called me and said, David, you better come to see me. I haven't seen you for a while. I wanted to come and have something special to show you. Already, son Daniel was sitting next to me. And I said, Dan, let's go and see what Oliver has. If he's telephoning me, there is a reason. I walk in. And what he puts in front of me, he puts in front of me this album. I opened it. And at the first glance, I recognized Aurangzeb's handwriting. So I knew that is his album. So long to cut the longest story short, we bought it off him. And as you see here today, I'm sharing it with you as Aurangzeb's album. I'm showing you now two pages from Sheikh Hamdullah, who was extremely famous, as he was one of the great calligrapher in the history of Ottoman period. He lived to serve under two sultans, Sultan Salim and his son, Solomon the Magnificent. The story goes that one night he was writing a couple of pages. He was busy in the middle of the night. He had the candle next to him. And he was writing, as you see, what is on the screen. And as he went to put his pen into ink, he realized that somebody is holding the ink well for him. He looked back. And it was the sultan who was holding the ink well for him. So in haste, he turned around to him and said, Your Majesty, this is a great honor for me to see you holding an ink well for me. And the legend says that the sultan turned around to him and said, no, the honor is mine. For as long as there are calligrapher like you, there would be many sultans who are holding the ink well for you. Obviously, Islamic art covers a lot of areas. We published so far about 20 volumes. And by the time we finish, hopefully by next year and the following year, it will be 37 volumes. And that would cover every medium of art. I'm showing you just some Fatimid jewelry. We already published our jewelry collection. So this is just two examples of magnificence of Fatimid period. India was legendary for having, because it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And the moguls were the lovers of stones and enameling. On the left, you see that beautiful falcon with virtually pigeon blood rubies and beautiful flat diamonds. And a beak is ruby, too. And on the other side, you see probably one of the largest hookers that's the only one that we know of. It's 3 and 1 half kilo of enamel and gold. It has been exhibited around the world in many of our exhibitions. I took the opportunity to show you this, because there is an exhibition called Power and Protection. In Ashmolyam, it's ongoing. And on the left-hand side, that's the cover of the catalog, which is one of our pieces. It's a two-hand of the Fatimid that I showing you on the right-hand side. It's probably earlier than 18th century. We call it the 18th century. We want to be conservative. So if you have a chance, go and see that exhibition. It's a fantastic exhibition. And we are a major contributor to it. It's virtually almost close to half of the objects come from us. I chose this because I have a beautiful story to tell you behind it. And that's why you're here tonight, not only to look at the objects, to know some of his history behind it, too. We were traveling. We were in France with our family. And a friend of mine who is a boy's only jewelry. His business is nothing else than buying jewelry. Telephoned me and said, David, I bought something very important. I wanted to see. I said, I'm traveling. So after I come back to London, I come and see you. So I would go and see him. And he turns around to me, put that in front of me. I want to see. I knew what it was. And he did his research. He knew what it was. It's probably the short jahan period. It is made out of a 93-floorless Colombian emerald, which is shaped into what you see. It's not very big as you see. It's four centimeters by five centimeters. But it was sold at the pre-Columbian sale at Sotheby's. And he bought it for virtually nothing. He turned around to me and said, but I want eggs. I said, hold your horses. You can't ask 25 times more than you would pay for. So he looked at me and said, I can. And you are going to pay for it. And we did. Again, that had been exhibited in many places. As you heard, we have an exhibition of our own that is only drawn from our own eight collections. And we contribute to a lot of exhibitions around the world. This was the recent exhibition at Mr. Polter Museum of Art. These caskets, I bought that in Christie's about 30 years ago. It has the combination of steel remnants of it on the bottom of the lid. So without even telling me, they put our piece on the cover of the catalog of the Metropolitan. So it is one of the rarest metal work pieces in our collection. This came again from Oliver almost 35 years ago. It's a pair of door knockers. Each of them weighs probably about 30 kilos, 25 kilos. As you see, the size is monumental. It's almost 40 centimeters by 35 centimeters. So and again, from this period, there are not that many metal works of that size and that caliber. The story of this is very beautiful, too. In 1960, a very good friend of mine, Haishem Khosravani, who I bought a lot of miniatures and a lot of things from, I come to it later, was traveling in Tehran. And there was a guy who was, we call them samsars, the guy who sells all sorts of things from one pound to whatever it is. He walks in and there is a heap of Islamic objects in the corner of his gallery. He looks and he sees the corner of this mask. He pulls it off and buys it for something like $3 or $4 from him. And then he realizes the importance of it. He brought it to London and later on I purchased it from him. The similar piece to that was discovered or excavated in Kiev. And now it's in St. Petersburg in Hermitage. That one is probably 13th century. This one, because of the design and the writing on a forehead of the mask, we think that it is Anatolia and it must be from Turkey. It's a major piece and it has a lot of power when you look at it. Again, this story is very relevant too. There are only two gold saddles in the world and we went with the family when we had exhibitions in that part of the world to pass through China because we had the exhibition in Australia. We went to the museum to see it. There is one in the museum in China in Beijing and this is the second one. The one in Beijing is not complete. Some part of it is missing. This is a complete one. Gold was extremely, extremely, extremely expensive during that period. You're talking about 12th century. There are not many, as I said, many gold saddles. There is this one and the one in Beijing. So we are just proposing that that could have been because of the significance of it, belonging to somebody very important. And we came up to say that it could maybe or perhaps could be a Chinese gold saddle. I chose that for different reasons too. We hear nowadays about music to be forbidden in Islam. This is nothing but just a mirage. Every Caliph used to have musicians in their palaces. They used to have them around them. Each time they came back from a war, not only they had musicians around them, they had figures, their palaces was full of figures. So all these ideas are man-made. It had nothing to do with what we see and the evidences we have. I chose that because you see the Caliph sitting in the middle there and the musicians are sitting around him. So it's Silver in Day and it's from Jazeera or probably from Western Iraq. The Fatimid were master of creating incredible objects. You saw some of the gold one I showed you, but Glass was against another Forte of the Fatimid dynasty. There are not many intact one known. This was found apparently wrapped in a jar. We bought this about 40 years ago. It's absolutely intact and it weighs probably about 40 grams, 50 grams. It's absolutely as light as a feather. So I thought I would share that with you. Our Glass collection had been published by the way. This is another piece and the reason I chose it is because it has the name of the Sultan Barqouk. So we know when he reigned, which was about 1385 or earlier, and his name is written on the top of the mosque lamp. Doing my PhD in this university on Islamic lacquer, I thought I would share at least one piece with you. It's my home. We learned that to the Indian exhibition at Metropolitan too. Rahim Edaqani was a very famous and eminent maker of pen boxes and a master lacquer painter. So as you see, you can sometimes believe that point is can be to that height because if you blow these figures on the top of this pen box, and as you see, it's very small, to one meter by one meter, it would look like a Renaissance painting that shows the strength, the ability, and the passion of these artists. We're extremely lucky to have 10 Shah-Tahmas pages called Hutan pages. I'm sure everybody knows about Hutan Shah Nami pages. According to a herald tribune, when one of one was sold not long ago, it belongs to Kari Ralsh, they called it one of the greatest relics of humanity, not as a Persian miniature. We own 10 of them, and we are lucky because Kari Ralsh before the document, before the book, the Shah Nami was dispensed by Hutan. 85 of them are in Iran, about the same number, 90 something are in Iran, the same number are in metropolitan because it was given as a tax deduction. But before it was dispensed, Kari Ralsh chose 10 of the best according to him. So these are the 10 which was bought by my friend Khosar Avani at the time, and we were lucky to buy not only these 10 pages, this is one of them close-up. But we bought other things from him too, including the mask and including a lot of other miniatures, which are coming in two volumes, they are being published hopefully next year. So this is one of them. This is another one, I made a small discovery and I hope I'm right. And if anybody disagrees in the audience with me, when we go to have our Lebanese food, please bring it to my attention. This is supposed to be a pharaonic sending his son some gifts from the treasury. I looked at it and it shows a lot of happiness in these miniatures. And I realized that Noru's is the first of spring and it's a new year in Persia. So Noru's means a new day. And the first day of spring is the first day of spring. This is when we're becoming nature, when we welcome nature. So even the camels are laughing. So I decided that it must be a happy occasion and it could be Noru's. Now if you disagree with me, come to me and challenge me. Now in my lectures from time to time, I challenge the audience. This is one of them. This is a miniature from Padi Shah Naameh. We have a page and the majority of these are in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen. As you see on the top of the miniature, you see Shah Jahan sitting up there. This is almost as small as your nail on your small finger, all right? So if you blow this up to the size of what you see on a screen, again as I said, it would look like the Renaissance painting. Again that shows the strength, the ability of these artists. The story here is very revealing too. Rashid Odin was a vizier of two rulers at the time of the Mongols, Ghazan Khan and Ujai too. At the age of 30, he was born as a Jew. At the age of 30, he converted that became Muslim because he wanted to become a vizier. He was given the commission to write the history of the world. He started to write the history of the world by the history of the Chinese. But then he expanded and did the history of the world from the time of Adam to the time, to his time. The sad story is, and I'm showing you the next one too, we owe two parts. There are only two parts that exist today out of most of these, the books that was written by him illuminated by his team in Tabriz as sent throughout the kingdom at the time. One is in Scotland and it is in the library in Edinburgh and this one belonged to Asian society. In 1980, they decided to sell it. My friend, the Hoshen bought it at the time it broke all the record. We had it conserved because whenever we buy anything, the first thing we do, we conserve it, we don't hang around. So we conserved it, but the story doesn't end there. During the Ghazan Khan, he was a favorite of the ruler, but when Ujjal Tu came in, there was a conspiracy against him. They beheld his son in front of him. They beheld him too, and they turned his head on the top of a stick and prayed it around town and they called him, this is the head of a Jew, even though he did so much for Islam at the time. But the irony is that almost 800 years later, the cousin of him again is the custodian of the peace that he commissioned to be written. Thank you. Pottery in Islam is legendary. Everybody knows about different pottery from different parts of the world. This piece is a lack of it from Syria. As you look at it at the glance, you say probably this is Picasso, it's a modern art. You don't consider it to be something Islamic, but that's not the story. The story is that that came up for sale in Paris and I didn't have a chance to buy it, so a friend of mine, a dealer friend of mine bought it and it was virtually painted all over because it was broken in a few pieces, but because they wanted to cover the cracks, they virtually repainted the entire piece. So I looked at the back of it, I bought it, we cleaned it in its totality, restored it, and not even one epsom is missing. It's only four or five pieces, so we put it together. So that was the challenge. My father, when I was, I think nine years old, sold this piece to a friend of ours who later went to the United States called Habib Anomian. It's a luster piece, it's intact and extremely rare because intact pottery is in Islam or not as plentiful as in other cultures. We sold it to him and I packed it for him when I was, I think, 10 years old and he gave me a tip for packing it. Later on he decided when he got a bit older that he would sell his entire collection so he could telephone me, I flew to New York. I wrote the invoice for every single piece and this is one of them, we bought about 50 pieces from him and delivered them back home. So the piece that I packed and I got the tip for ended up in the collection at the end. In our Islamic collection, we have, the book is coming out in two volumes this year. We have about 320 carpets and textile. I chose three for different reasons. The first one is Ushak. That was in a collection of a Swiss guy for about 120 years. We convinced him about 30 years ago to sell it to a servant who's a genius and I bought it. It's probably the most perfect Ushak carpet around. The one in the middle is even more interesting. I bought that from Michael Francis again about 35 years ago. And as I looked at it, I knew that that's a baby of the Ardeville carpets at the V&A. So to prove to ourselves that it is what it is, when they were restoring the one at the V&A, we took this one, we compared it and it is definitely the same period, the same time, the same at two years. So it is the baby of the one at the V&A. The one on the right is a textile of 16th century. And I decided that it cannot be just an ordinary piece of textile because the woman is wearing a crown. So in that period, there are not many ladies who were allowed to wear a crown. So amongst our friends, we are just assuming that that could be Shah Jahan's mother. We bought this piece from Spink in 1974. I bought a lot of textile from them. At the time, Menard was the Al-Qadbalesi soul and Francesco was the Francesco gallery. So we bought a group of textile and I looked at this textile, which is extremely early as you see and I realized that majority of the illumination in the Korans could have been inspired by this design. And this is why. So I chose four of our Korans in our collections and I chose plenty more, but I chose some of the Sura headings just to show you that inspiration is something that everybody benefit from. This piece has a story too. This is one of our textile pieces. As you see, it's silk and silk from Morocco and the background is blue silk and the name of Allah is woven in silk, silver thread into the green silk. I had that in exhibition in Abu Dhabi when we had our big exhibition in Abu Dhabi which was the biggest exhibition in the Middle East and that was at the entrance of the exhibition. So a couple of artists came to me afterward and they said, would you allow us to copy this? I said you could copy whatever you want. Inspiration is something that you have to follow. Art is timeless. Why not? Copy it. A year later, I went back to Abu Dhabi because I was interested to see what's going on and I saw that copied on a black canvas and you know how you make topping on a cake. So he just put some paint, white paint and put Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah. So I said to him, you know something I'm interested. I have the original. So why don't you send me these? He said, oh, it's sold. I said, oh, it's sold already. So out of interest I said, how much for? He said, $900,000. I said, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it. How much? He said, $900,000. I said, excuse me. I bought that piece set years ago for $5,000. What you talking about? That shows you. Silk mogul carpets are rare. We are lucky to have this one. I wanted to share that with you. There was one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on loan for 80 years. And after 80 years, I think the heir of the people who gave the carpet approach met. They took it from the met and sold it to the government of Qatar. I wanted to buy it, but they paid me 0.4 times more than I was offering to pay. So good luck to them. Now, when I was in Abu Dhabi, we had the seminar and one of the speakers was me. And I turned around for the first time and I said, for the last 45 years, we have been buying objects belonging to Makkah Medina. One day we are going to... We are going to be in a process of writing four volumes about the history of Hajj called the Hajj and the autoplaying image. I shared the idea. Benisha Porter was in the audience. I shared the... She came back to me. I shared the idea with her. We ended up to give this exhibition at the British Museum. As you see, the cover is the piece. One of our pieces, the exhibition was majority of the pieces was from our collection. I'm very sensitive toward the object from Hajj. We have about 2,500 pieces belonging to Makkah Medina. What you see here is the panorama of Makkah which was at the exhibition. But the importance of it is, it's the first eye view of Makkah ever painted because the daughter of Wurangzeb sent his painter to sit down and paint Makkah stone by stone. Majority of what you see doesn't exist anymore. Photograph was started to be taken by Sader Bey in about 1840, 1850. So it's about 40 years later that we have photograph of Makkah Medina. But that's the real thing. But at the time, this Oudi guy came up with the magnetic... This piece is small, it's virtually nothing. And at the exhibition, a lot of people were appreciating it because he came up with the idea which was appealing. This is a Mamluk piece, probably early 14th century, 13th, 20th, 13th, 10th. It's a genealogy of the Prophet. It started the name of Prophet Muhammad and it runs through the next 40, 50 pages and it covers the history of Prophet from Adam to the given time at the time. We do not know of another genealogy of this period of this quality. Before that in Saudi, that belonged to a royal collection. I've been cheeky to do something else here. As you see, you see Alexander the Great in Makkah. You say to yourself, but that is 10th century BC. What is he doing in Makkah? But these are all the stories. And the legend goes that Makkah was already a holy place even before Islam. So that is the argument. And when we had the exhibition at the British Museum, Neil McGregor came to me and said, next time I do the 100 of the most important pieces in the world, I'm going to put that in it because that has a message. I said the most welcome. We have about 350 textile belonging to Makkah Medina. I'm sharing the earliest setara. As you know, every year they change the setara in front of the door of Kaaba. The Sultan used to do that. It used to be made sometime in Egypt, sometime in Turkey. And now the place, the atelier that produces this in Saudi Arabia, it costs an absolute amount of fortune. But the one that are produced now is not made out of actual metal. These are silver woven. There is no thread at all. Everything that you see and they weigh almost 30, 40 kilos, each of them. The one on the right, nobody knew about what Mahmal was, but we started to showing some of these in our exhibitions. This is the second earliest. The earliest one is in Topkap Sarai. This is the second earliest Mahmal. The significance of Mahmal was not really anything as much religious. It was more political. Because when they were trying to take the setara to Makkah, what they did, they put that on a camel and all the dignitaries were behind it to announce that we are taking the setara to Makkah. So that is the significance of it. What I always say, and here these roundels, we are lucky to have in actual fact two sets of them. The Senyama of Allah, Muhammad, Abu Bak, Omar, Osman, Ali, all six. And we have two sets of them. One set which is round and one set which is square. We are lending some of these to the next exhibition in Abu Dhabi of Hajj. This is one of the earliest coin of Hajj, which was minted in 105 in Makkah. This is a beautiful metal. On one side it had Makkah and on the other side it had Madinah. It's in gold. It was probably made as a gift by the order of somebody in Hajj. We're now coming to the Aramaic section. As a Jew, I decided that I've done so much for Islam that I don't want to be accused that I'm not doing anything for anybody else, which is the wrong way of looking at it. But I was very fortunate to come across this group. There are only two group of them of these Aramaic documents. One is in Bodil and Library and the other group is with us. So I got permission from Bodil and Library and this book is published and I'm publishing all of theirs alongside ours. So this one is from the Darius III, which alleges this supposed to be the husband of Esther, which is one of the greatest history of Judaism. This is the time that there was a conspiracy and the Persian king was supposed to kill all the Jews in the territory and the Jewish wife stopped him and after the Old Testament, the Begilat Esther, the story of Esther, is the second most sacred story in Judaism. So this is one of the sticks. The significant of that was that they were delivering the food or wheat or whatever it was to the palace and each time the delivery came, they cut a small piece and made the point that today there was a delivery done and on the other side when they came back, again they chopped it. So they had the number of the deliveries coming to the palace. This is a letter from one back king to another and on one of these documents, you see the name of Alexander the Great. His name was not Alexander, his name was Alexanderus. So if you see his name in Aramaic, Alexanderus, and don't forget that that was the language of Moses, Jesus. And that is how he spoke to his disciple and till the day Jesus was crucified, he used to be called a Hebrew rabbi. And this is the language that he spoke, Aramaic. So we are very lucky that we have two of the greatest academics in Jerusalem, took them seven years to write this book. And one of them passed away, Professor Naveh, and I heard from Professor Shakit, the other author, that he turned around and said that at least I'll leave the legacy behind. Majority art, people ask me, why did you collect majority art for a simple reason? Van Gogh in one of his letter to his brother Theo said, in a way, all my work is based on Japanese art. The significant and magnificent of this art is almost on parallel. The first exhibition we gave was in 1994 at the British Museum. And simultaneously, a part of it, which was porcelain, was shown at Museum in Wales. It was opened by the Prince of Wales. Here I'm showing you just some examples. These samurais, usually when we have an exhibition, we show them at the door and we say, these are the guardians of the exhibition. So we joked around. This is the close-up of it. It's gold in late on metal. These artists, whenever there was an exhibition, and this is again something extremely interesting to know, whenever there was an exhibition, those days they used to have expositions in France, in London, in Chicago. The number of the visitors, if I tell you, you would say that it is impossible, but it's not impossible, it's not recorded. The one in Paris at the time in about 1884, 83, when the population of France was no more than 20 million, the exhibition with Japanese attracted close to 50 million visitors. So Japanese was extremely hot. The cabinet you see was given in 1921 by the Crown Prince of Japan in his visit to London to Edward VIII. It was in the palace for years. Seven artists were responsible to make this cabinet. In 1936, the palace decided that it was too difficult to look after lacquer. They gave it to Christie. We have the letter from the backhand palace that it was given to Christie's. Christie's sold it, not to us, to somebody else, and we were lucky to have it. So it's a great piece of Japanese lacquer. This is a huge piece of, part of a garniture of three. This is a centerpiece. I woke up at two o'clock in the morning to buy it in the sale in Japan because it was in a museum for about 30 years and then the family took it and they were selling it. It comes in three pieces that's born in the middle and there are two voices on the left and the right. We have one of the voices and finally enough we discovered that the other voice is in San Francisco in a chain of Italian restaurants. We are trying to buy it off them and each time we go to them, they say buy the company and you could have the voice. We decided that we would give an exhibition of our Japanese pieces in Magog Museum for the same reason that he said in a way all my work is based on Japanese art and the first thing he ever, ever purchased between himself and his brother, Theo, he didn't have much money, was a small Japanese enamel vase that was given to their mother for her birthday present. We exhibited that which is already in Magog. So we put 36 of his paintings alongside about 200 of our pieces, the same time as the main exhibition in Amsterdam and they told us afterward that usually those three months brings in about 160,000 visitors. For these exhibitions, they had 320,000 visitors because it was a sort of a challenge to them to see why Magog turns around and says in a way all my work is based on Japanese art. So that was, and you see the Magog painting next to it. There are 27 Faberge eggs. One is missing, they're supposed to be 28. We don't know what number 28 is, but the other 27 are allocated. This is the only Japanese egg that we know of. It's almost five times bigger. We have a few of Faberge pieces, about 80 pieces in our enamel collection. You see some of them in a minute. But again, these are considered a treasure of Japan. The same as this. This was, by the way, the poster of the British Museum exhibition and the title was, It's an art that can never be repeated again because what these art is produced, it's just phenomenon. When we had the exhibition at the British Museum, our curator, I'm not naming him, he had a bit of too much drink and Ambassador and cultural attaché of Japan came especially to see the exhibition. So he turned around to one of them and he was looking at one of the pieces and he said, this is incredible how my ancestor made pieces like that. And Victor turned around to the cultural attaché and said, I bet Jesus was sitting next to them helping them. This is considered to be one of the greatest 19th century pieces of bronze in the world. They have a lot of pieces in our Japanese collection. We lent one to the bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy. And the Royal Academy exhibition got tremendous amount of press. But there was always a small complaint. They were saying, why didn't you borrow more Japanese bronzes? Why only one? Because we only gave them one at a time. These are the porcelain from the same period, Meiji period, which is 1968, 1912. These are three apoteres from that period. As you see in the middle, it's like it's woven, but it is not, it's all made out of apotery. They were real masters. When I was showing the one on the right with the fish to Prince Charles because I gave him the tour of the exhibition, he said, I have similar koi in my pond. Can I touch it? I said, your Highness, you can touch it, but you cannot have the piece. Touching is okay, but not having the piece. So that was the joke between me and him. I'm showing you four photographs. Challenge me. Do you think these are photographs? Yes or no? Okay. This is another part of the artistic ability of the Japanese artists. These are silk embroideries, and we have about a hundred of them because I decided that I'm going to go for as many as I can find. They sometimes took paintings of different type and copied it. We own a very big collection of kimono. We are, I'm showing you three different type, Edo period, Meiji period, and later period, which is Taishu period. Swedish textile. It's another story. We had a Swedish claim that we thought it was Islamic. There was a friend of ours, Doris Blau, in town. We called him in. We called her in. We showed her the piece. He said, this is nothing to do with Islam. This is Swedish. I asked her how many pieces she has. He said 30, 40. I bought the 30, 40 pieces. Buildup opponent. We have a collection of about a hundred. It's published, and the book has been out for about 20 years. This is another piece, and this is another piece. This is very much Islamic, in actual fact. The design is very Islamic. This is the metalwork, the Zuluaga, the exhibition we gave was at the Bicton Albert Museum. Morrison, Lord Morrison was one of the biggest sponsor of these artists. The family were painters and inlay masters for the court of Spain. We have about a hundred pieces all in, in whole of Spain. We have probably about 30, 40 pieces. And the second largest piece after the piece that he made for the burial, for the tomb of Philip. This is the second largest piece we have. This is another piece which has enamel. This is very large. This is almost one meter 60. And again, gold and silver inlay. I brought that in because he was inspired by Alhamdor vases. And the third pair of vases that we have, you see, as you see it on the right, this was his inspiration. A lot of these objects have a writing on them inlay which says, La ga la la la la. Victory belongs to God. This is a very nasty piece because they ruled Spain for almost 300 years. In the enamel of the word, it starts with Chinese. I'm showing you eight panels. But I ask Anna to catalog them at the V&A because we had about 10 people, 12 people writing our book, including Tatania Faberge. She said, I'm not cataloging these. These are the treasure of China. I had to go back to the dealer, find out the history of it, give them the documentation for them to catalog it for us. It has been exhibited and the exhibition was at Hermitage about four, five years ago. The exhibition of enamel with Hermitage and even Putin went to see it. You like him or not, but he did. The story of this is very interesting too. I was in Paris, visiting my family. A friend of mine said to me, you're decorating your house. I understand your wife is interested in 1940s, 1930s stuff. Let's go to Didi Aaron and maybe you find something there. I'll walk in. I see this table on the floor. I couldn't believe that it could be genuine. I turned around to him and I said, how the heck am I going to find out if it is genuine or not? So I turned around and said, I understand you have very good cappuccino or espresso here to the owner, to Didi Aaron. He passed away, God bless his soul. As he went to get the coffee, I quickly turned the table to see if I could see the name and the signature of the imperial court and I knew that I'm on the right track. So we bought it. And again, there are only two in the world. One is in China and this is the second one. This one is absolutely mint condition. A Faberge clock. So this is again part of the enamel collection. The story of this is very interesting too. It was being just about to be sold in Christie's as a porcelain. And the gentleman was running down to go to another department and saw that amongst other pieces, they said, what this enamel is doing here? They said, this is not enamel, this is porcelain. They said, no, no, no, no, no, it is not. They opened it back up and they found out it's a 18th century, very rare and I made the close up to show you that it's like a Dutch painting when you blow it up and it's enamel. We have two of these chargers. This is 16 and a half kilos. It was given to the president of France and we are lucky to be the temporary custodian as all of us say, not the owner, I hate the name owner. So we have the two. I'm showing you the one which is St. George's. It's by Afchenikov, one of the masters. In 1972, I was visiting New York. I walked into a silver shop and I saw hundreds of pieces on the floor. I said, what is this? They said, this is part of a wine system. I looked and they were lucky jewelry pieces on the ground. To cut the long story short, about in 1992, it was sitting in our warehouse for almost 35 years and when we decided to put our collection together, it's 3,600 ounces of silver, gold and enamel. This one is interesting to see. We learned that to the exhibition of Indian exhibition at the Victor and Albert Museum. We traveled throughout Europe. Anna wrote a letter to me. She's sitting here somewhere. She's been helping us a lot with our Japanese. She's a fantastic academic. A lot of people who were visiting the exhibition were going to do this piece first because it weighs almost a ton of iron, silver, enamel and portly, gold. I'm showing you just part of our publication. As you heard, by the time we finish, we'll end up with 90 volumes. I'm showing you some of the Japanese, nine volumes, some of the other catalogs that are all out except the remaining of the Islamic. All the others are out. And these are some of the posters that each one we have exhibitions will use for publicity purposes for people to come see the exhibition. And this is, as I said, I put you on the right on our fast track. If you are interested and if you are inspired to see what these magnificent artists have done, reserve your praises for the soul of the artist who have produced this object, not for me. God bless you, thank you. Professor Kallili, David, thank you very much indeed. What an absolute tour de force. David promised he would do it in an hour. And I have to tell you, I didn't believe him. And you did, so thank you. Thank you so much, because there were 86 slides for those of you who weren't counting. David, I also wanted to thank you personally for the huge commitment and support you've shown us here at SOAS, for the work that we do, for the robust debate that we have here as a school. It's not always an easy place to be. It's not, it's below that. And we sometimes give you a very hard time. Doesn't matter. So we thank you a huge amount for that continued support. And those of you who have been able to visit our new building, our new wing, the poor Webley wing, I hope you saw the absolutely wonderful bronze incense burner, which was made by the Imperial Court artist, Suzuki Masayoshi of Tokyo, which adorns our cloisters in the poor Webley wing. And again, that was very generously loaned to us by Professor Kalili. She deserved much more by the way. So thank you very much. And tonight is not just about recognizing you, David, as an art collector. It's also about the work that you have done in promoting peace and interfaith across the world. And we very much want to thank you for that. Can we also, everyone should have received a copy of the Kalili collections. I have to tell you that that's been very generously donated by David as well. And if you didn't collect one on the way in, please collect one on the way out. We don't have time for questions now, but we are all invited upstairs for a reception. Don't mob David too much. Thank him very much for tonight, but also for hosting the wonderful food you're going to experience when you go upstairs. Thank you again. That was absolutely wonderful.