Museum of Islamic Art — the principal Islamic-art collection in Cairo.

What you are looking at

The Museum of Islamic Art sits on Bab El-Khalq Square in central Cairo, in a purpose-built 1903 building designed by the Italian architect Alfonso Manescalo for what was then called the Museum of Arab Art. The collection grew from the late-19th-century work of the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe — the Egyptian heritage commission that catalogued the historic buildings of Cairo from 1882 onward and collected loose architectural elements, woodwork, ceramics and metalwork that would otherwise have been lost as the medieval city was modernised. The museum opened in its current building in 1903 and reached its present scope through accessions in the 1920s and 1930s. The total collection is approximately 100,000 objects; the display galleries hold approximately 4,400 on any given rotation.

The standard scholarly view is that this is the most important single Islamic-art collection outside of the Topkapı Sarayı in Istanbul and the Louvre's Islamic gallery in Paris. The Egyptian and Mamluk material in particular is matched nowhere else, and the Mamluk metalwork collection — incense burners, candlesticks, basins, qanadil mosque-lamp glassware — is the recognised global reference for the period. The Ottoman-Cairo material complements the Egyptian collection seamlessly: the Suhaymi-family mashrabiya panels that came to the museum after the 1996-2000 Bayt Al-Suhaymi restoration are visible in gallery 14 alongside the equivalent Ottoman-Cairo woodwork from the wider Comité collection.

The museum's recent history is dominated by the January 2014 vehicle bomb attack on the Cairo Security Directorate across the square. The blast caused severe damage to the building's facade, shattered display cases and pulverised an estimated 179 objects beyond restoration. The conservation and rebuilding programme — partly funded by UNESCO, partly by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, with technical assistance from the Italian-Egyptian conservation programme that had previously worked on Bayt Al-Suhaymi — ran from 2014 through 2022 in successive phases. The museum reopened in stages: the central reception hall in 2017, the first ten galleries in 2018, the textile and metalwork wing in 2020, and the final five galleries in 2022.

On the ground

Address: 1 Sharia Bur Said, Bab El-Khalq Square, Cairo. The building sits on the eastern side of the square, opposite the National Library. Standard opening hours are 09:00–17:00 daily, including Fridays (the museum closes during the noon prayer hour 12:30–13:30 on Friday only). The ticket office closes 30 minutes before the building. At the last verification (6 June 2026), the foreign adult ticket was EGP 300; foreign student with valid international card EGP 150; Egyptian national EGP 30. A photography permit (hand-held cameras only, no flash) is EGP 50.

Transport: from the El-Manial desk, 15 minutes by taxi across the Malek El-Saleh bridge and north along the corniche. From Tahrir Square, 10 minutes by taxi or 15 minutes' walk. The nearest metro station is Mohamed Naguib on Line 2 (a 6-minute walk through the small streets behind the National Library). Visitors combining the museum with the Al-Mu'izz Street walking route typically do the museum in the morning and walk the medieval street in the afternoon; the practical sequence is morning–museum, lunch in central Cairo, afternoon–walk.

Bag policy: standard backpacks larger than 30×30 cm are required to go to the cloakroom inside the entrance. Cameras, phones, water bottles and notebooks are permitted in the galleries. The cloakroom service is free and well-organised. Audio guides in English, Arabic, French and Italian are available at the entrance for EGP 80; the English-language audio guide was refreshed in late 2024 and is now reasonably current.

The museum maintains active research-access arrangements through its curatorial office. The procedure for consulting specific reserve objects is set out below, as observed at the June 2026 verification:

1. Identify the object. The curatorial office does not entertain open-ended applications. Name the specific accession number(s) from the published catalogue volumes.
2. Submit a bilingual application. Cover letter expected in English and Arabic on institutional headed paper, addressed to the Director of Curatorial Affairs by current name (verified in the subscriber notes). Body of the letter sets out institutional affiliation, the specific object(s), the research purpose, and proposed dates.
3. Wait. The current backlog is approximately three months from submission to first response. A confirmed slot is then booked typically four to six weeks after that.
4. On-site consultation. The research room is on the building's second floor above the textile wing. Pencils only. Photography on request, per-object.

Subscribers at Library and Field tiers receive the current bilingual application template, the Director's current name and contact, and the recent acceptance-rate statistics. Service C (gallery-route memo) is the desk's commissioned offering for general visitors wanting a custom-prepared route through the public galleries.

Reading list

• Wiet, G. Catalogue général du Musée arabe du Caire. Eight volumes, IFAO 1929–1957. The historical catalogue of record.
• O'Kane, B. (ed.). The Treasures of the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo. American University in Cairo Press, 2012 (reissued 2018 with post-bombing essay). Standard accessible modern reference.
• Abdelhamid, K. and Lebret, I. The 2017–2022 Reopening of the Museum of Islamic Art. Suhaymi Archive subscriber monograph, 2023.
• Annales Islamologiques. Articles on individual collection objects, IFAO Cairo, 1954–present.
• Suhaymi Archive field notebooks 2014–2026, "MIA" tag.