Rambling in a renaissance, in every piece … a personality
THE TAREK RAJAB MUSEUM
When I first met Jehan and Tareq Rajab in early 1980 they were preparing for the opening of their private museum in Jabriya. The very first museum of Islamic art and culture in the region, the Tareq Rajab Museum houses a magnificent, world-renowned collection assembled exclusively by this extraordinary couple. Over the years I was to have many fascinating meetings and interviews with them and they were always gracious, charming, and generous with their time and extensive knowledge.
Forty-one years later, the museum has just reopened with the lifting of some of the Covid-19 related restrictions and I’m sitting in the same corner of the museum where I first interviewed the Rajabs. This time, however, it’s their son, Dr Ziad Rajab, who I’m pumping for information. Sadly, his parents have passed away; Jehan in 2015 and Tareq a year later, both at the age of 81. Ziad and his brother Nadr, and sister, Nur, have 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, and who will take over its custodianship in the future poses a weighty question.
But today Ziad is busy planning an exhibition called “The Jehan Rajab Collection of Palestinian Embroidery and Costume.” It will be held in the nearby Dar El Cid exhibition halls that were designed by Tareq Rajab. It’s a timely exhibition that will feature around three dozen costumes from nine different regions of Palestine. “Palestinian Embroidery” was the subject of extensive research carried out by Jehan and is also the title of a book she wrote which is now a classic in its genre.
Over a fifty year period, the Rajabs collected more than 30,000 artifacts, of which approximately 10,000 are on permanent display at the museum. The fact that they personally acquired and researched every item in this incredibly wideranging collection gives the museum a unique character and charm all its own.
Ziad recalls his parents’ lengthy road trips during the 1960s when they explored Europe, Central Asia, India, Indonesia, and the Arab world. It was during these journeys that the couple began collecting artifacts and photographing monuments, peoples, their costumes and jewelry; everything they believed could be used and exhibited in a museum. While on the road they 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 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.
“My mother was a fearless woman,” Ziad muses. “She felt comfortable with people and was very confidant, while my father was a little more reserved by nature.
She could walk into any village and have an instant rapport with the inhabitants.”
Ziad recalls several incidents that illustrate his mother’s spontaneous methods of fieldwork. A meeting that his wife Leila had arranged with a very senior Tibetan monk at a Buddhist temple in Singapore was scheduled for just half an hour, but Jehan plied the monk with questions for some three hours. When the family was staying at a traditional ryokan hotel in Japan and Jehan and Leila went to the ladies’ bathhouse, they spent several hours learning about Japanese life and customs from the friendly local ladies. Jehan found it quite difficult to tear herself away from their pleasant and informative company. All this transpired without Jehan speaking a word of Japanese or the Japanese women knowing any English.
In 1985, Ziad spent a week in Jordan with his mother, driving to small towns and villages that she had previously visited by herself. Most of the men in those places were truck drivers so the women were home alone and invited them in for meals and interesting conversations. They were very pleased to see Jehan again and were also fascinated by young Ziad.
One scorching hot summer in the 1990s, Ziad was driving across Oman’s rugged and isolated Musandam region with his mother when she spotted a woman and a goat climbing up a mountain. “Stop!” she shouted and leapt out of the car and ran to catch up with the woman and the goat. She engaged the woman in conversation, asking her how the last season’s rains had been as an ice-breaker, and after about fifteen minutes returned to the car.
“I can’t remember what else they talked about, but after that my mother was happy since she had learned something new,” says Ziad.
Jehan incorporated the information she acquired in many of these first-hand interviews, along with much additional research, to produce a number of books about ethnic jewelry, costumes, culture, archaeology, and traditions. According to Ziad, his mother began writing and conducting ethnographic research at a very young age. When just twenty years old she went to live and travel with a group of gypsies in Great Britain, subsequently contributing an article on gypsy lifestyle to “The Journal of Gypsy Studies.”
She kept in touch with them and in the late 1960s took her children and stayed with the gypsies for a month, helping them with fruit picking. Ziad remembers it as a wonderful summer spent playing outdoors and roaming the countryside with the gypsy children.
Ziad feels fortunate to have had many fascinating childhood experiences as a result of having such adventurous and unconventional parents. He recalls that on several occasions the family set off by car from Kuwait intending to drive to the UK, only to end up spending six weeks in Greece, Turkey, or some other destination they found too intriguing to merely rush through.
“Once my parents drove from Kuwait to England in a VW Beetle. In 1965 my mother bought a caravan in the UK and drove with me, my brother, sister, and several cats and dogs to meet up with my father in Istanbul,” says Ziad.
While Jehan was the most outgoing member of the family, her husband was equally dauntless, enterprising, and extremely talented. In 1953, Tareq Rajab was the first Kuwaiti to be sent abroad to study art, education, and archaeology when he was awarded a government scholarship for a five-year degree course in the UK.
In his book, “Tareq Sayid Rajab and the development of fine art in Kuwait” he recorded poignant memories of life in old Kuwait and those early days in the UK. “Kuwait with its dusty roads and one-story sun baked houses was a peaceful and clean place with no rubbish in sight and no motorcars to pollute the air. There was just the vast desert and the limitless waters of the Gulf with grand old dhows gracing the old protected harbors or sailing down the Gulf spreading their great white sails on their way south to distant lands beyond our limited horizon. Suddenly I was thrust into the lush countryside of Oxfordshire where I lived in a wonderful pseudo Victorian house with strange people and where I had to learn a different way of life and speak in a different language. I was completely lost at first and felt homesick for the first time in my life.”
The young artist’s thirst for learning, however, soon drowned out his homesickness. Whereas other less motivated individuals might have been overwhelmed by such challenges, Tareq Rajab soaked up the skills and knowledge offered him with as much enthusiasm as he soaked himself in the rain while exploring the woods and rolling hills on long walks. The old mansion where he lived was a meeting place for writers, artists, and other interesting and helpful people who not only enabled him to master the English language but opened up whole new horizons of concepts, ideas, and thought.
“I was adaptable and ready to absorb and I learned so much, without even realizing that I was learning,” he wrote in his book.
Along with his studies, the other major turning point in his life came when he met and married his wife, Jehan, in 1955. Born to British parents stationed in Brazil, well-traveled, adventurous Jehan shared many interests with Tareq and turned out to be his true soulmate.
Writing about Jehan in his book he said, “She was my guardian angel, and helped me a great deal with my work and when I felt frustrated and discouraged she forced me forward and gave me great encouragement. We have been inseparable ever since and have helped each other to shape our lives...”
And what extraordinary lives they lived! Pioneers in their chosen fields, they both had many talents. Besides being an accomplished artist and archaeologist, Tareq was an excellent photographer, master potter, designer, and builder. Both were prolific authors. In 1969 they established the New English School, the first English secondary school in Kuwait, and also worked their entire lives as educators and school administrators.
“My parents were so focused,” Ziad remarks. “My mother would work at the school in the morning and then go to the museum and work there until 7:00 p.m. My father also had a very strong work ethic. He was obsessive about his work and if he had an objective in mind, nothing could distract him. I remember in the late 90s I suggested to my father that we get a beach chalet and he was quite annoyed. ‘Do you think I have time to sit on a beach?’ he said angrily. For both my parents, work was pleasure.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that Ziad inherited many of his parents’ positive traits and took on the formidable role of stepping into their shoes. As his mother did, he works as Director of the New English School in the morning, and spends a lot of time at the museum. He also travels, researches, and writes articles and attends seminars, meetings, and workshops on conservation and other museum-related subjects. He is impressively well-versed in fields as diverse as history, Islamic art, archaeology, calligraphy, cookery, and ethnic costumes and textiles, and enjoys playing the flute in ensembles. His widerange of knowledge is apparent when I ask him to show me some of his favorite items in the museum.
Ziad leads the way to a glass showcase where an extremely rare complete section from the Uljaytu collections of Qurans is on display. It dates from the year 1310. In a brief history lesson he explains that it was commissioned by Sultan Uljaytu, one of the Ilkhanid rulers who traced his ancestry back to General Hulagu and Genghis Khan. It was Hulagu who sacked Baghdad in 1258, bringing an end to the Abbassid Empire. Sultan Uljaytu established his capital in Iran where the arts, and especially calligraphy, flourished.
“The holy Quran is divided into thirty parts of varying lengths, called juz’. This beautifully illuminated manuscript is a very rare complete juz’, signed by Ali ibn Muhammad al-Husayni, the famous calligrapher who wrote it, as well as by two ministers,” Ziad says.
Ziad learned a great deal about antique Quranic manuscripts from his father, who was an expert in this field. In 2007 Tareq Rajab opened a separate museum dedicated exclusively to calligraphy called the Tareq Rajab Museum of Islamic Calligraphy. It houses some of the world’s best works of this quintessential Islamic art form, including manuscripts of unsurpassed beauty by some of the Ottoman sultans and textile coverings of the holy Kaaba richly embroidered in silver and gold wire. The calligraphy museum was designed by Tareq Rajab and is also located in Jabriya, opposite the New English School.
In the same room as the Quranic manuscripts are some extremely rare cast bronze and brass incense burners with extensive engraved and openwork decoration. The first incense burner, Ziad explains, was made in the eleventh century, probably by an Iraqi or Syrian metalworker who had been influenced by designs brought from as far afield as Afghanistan. It’s in the shape of a domed monument known as a Buddhist stupa.
“Afghanistan was a meeting place for Buddhism and Islam,” notes Ziad, “and their
local artwork exhibited both Islamic and Buddhist symbolism and design such as the very prominent eternal knot that forms part of the decoration on this incense burner.”
In an adjacent showcase is an incense burner that Ziad refers to as the Fatimid lion, originating in eleventh or twelfth century Egypt. Another larger, extremely rare incense burner also features an animal that looks like a lion, in front of a Buddhist stupa with a head of the same type of animal on each corner.
Ziad points out that the incense burner was signed by a master metalworker by the name of Ali, most likely Ali ibn Muhammad al-Tahi’, who signed a very similar, but smaller “lion” that is in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
Ziad notes that his father had a special talent for acquiring remarkable items, an eye and a feeling for the exceptional, combined with what he describes as luck and positioning. “He was around in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when it was a buyer’s market for Islamic antiques since not that many people were interested. As far back as the 1960s, when my father was Kuwait’s Director of Antiquities, he tried to get a budget from the government to establish an Islamic art museum, but he was not successful.”
Tareq Rajab bought the incense burners from auction houses, where he found many other unique artifacts. Estate sales at stately homes in England and India also yielded many treasures, as did flea markets.
Ziad recalls an incident when he and his mother were in London, sitting at a café opposite the famous flea market on Portobello Road. “Something caught my eye at an antique silver vendor’s stall across the road. I ran over and discovered that the item was an antique tantour, the traditional tall, conical silver headdress once worn by Druze women. My mother was fascinated by these headpieces and we were happy to add this one to her collection. There is a theory that the tantour was brought to the Levant by central Asian tribes after the Mongol invasion.”
In the 1970s and 80s, Portobello Road was still a real antiques market, and we found fabulous things there,” he adds.
Going from room to room in the museum with Ziad is a fascinating voyage of discovery. He points out a traditional dress from the Asir region of Saudi Arabia. It’s made of black material decorated with metal embroidery on the sleeves and bodice and panels of colorful embroidery down the sides. “People don’t think of Saudi Arabia as being very rich in traditional textiles and costumes but actually it’s inhabited by many different ethnic groups and there is great artistic diversity there,” he notes.
Traditional costumes and ethnic jewelry are two fields in which Jehan Rajab had a particular interest and the museum has an impressive collection of both. The first time I interviewed Jehan in 1980 she remarked, “Humans are seldom satisfied with an object that fulfills only basic functions. They need something that cheers, beautifies, and suggests to them things they love, things that intrigue and uplift the spirits. This both Islamic pottery and folk jewelry do with their beauty of line and color, or as in the case of some of the jewelry, their tinkling bells, pieces of warm amber and blue turquoise.”
Three long halls in the museum are filled with stunning examples of ethnic jewelry: amulets, ankle bells, gemencrusted belt buckles, ceremonial headpieces, ancient Sumerian items and Roman jewelry, Byzantine bangles, 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.
At the end of one of the corridors is a room separated from the rest of the hall by a set of antique Indian doors. Inside is a breathtaking display of spectacular gold jewelry from around the world. Among the treasures are precious pieces from ancient Egypt, second century Roman jewelry made in Syria, gem-encrusted neckpieces with fine enamel work from 18th century Mughal India, turquoise decorated pieces from the Arabian peninsula, and a gold necklace with Quranic inscriptions that was a gift to a princess from the Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman.
Antique Islamic firearms also comprise an impressive section of the museum and were another area of expertise for Tareq Rajab. In a collection that ranges from Morocco to India, and China to Central Asia, there are many examples of great beauty and the highest quality craftsmanship.
Ziad also contributed to this collection and tells the story of how he and his sister Nur spent a month in Kabul in the late 70s, when he was just eighteen years old. “We lived with an Afghani family and we absolutely loved Afghanistan,” he says. “One day we bought an enormous 19th century rifle from an antique store. When we left Kabul we took it with us in the cabin on board the flight to Tehran. When we tried to board our connecting Kuwait Airways flight the next day the customs officials told us couldn’t take the gun, but after about a half hour of arguing they let us check it in as baggage in the hold. Can you imagine trying to travel with such an item nowadays?” he laughs.
Ziad and Nur’s rifle is in a showcase along with other examples of the huge firearms that skillful Afghani riders somehow managed to use while mounted on horseback.
There are many more stories to be told but it’s getting late and before I go I ask Ziad about his plans for the museum. He says that he and his sister Nur are the family members most involved with the collection. Nur does the photographic archiving while Ziad carries out research on artifacts, academic work, and is compiling an online archive. He is also transcribing his mother’s diaries and has finished transcribing her collection of letters to her mother that began the day she arrived in Kuwait in 1959 and include all her mother’s replies.
Out of Tareq and Jehan Rajab’s nine grandchildren, only one lives in Kuwait and that is Ziad’s daughter Alanoude. “I’m trying to get her more involved in the museum. She has written up the description for the Palestinian costume exhibition,” he says.
That exhibition will be held at Dar El Cid exhibition hall sometime in September.
Opening hours for the Tareq Rajab Museum and the Tareq Rajab Museum of Islamic Calligraphy are from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m., and on Friday afternoons only. The entrance fee is 2 KD.
Treat yourself to a viewing of this marvelous private collection of beautiful items that will cheer, intrigue, and uplift your spirits. You’ll want to go back again and again.