I was twenty minutes' walk away and I did not go. That is the entry.
The collection began in the 1880s, under the Khedive Ismail, as objects gathered in the courtyard of a ruined mosque and housed in a small building someone called the Arab Museum. The present building at Bab al-Khalq was designed by Alfonso Manescalo in a neo-Mamluk manner — a nineteenth-century European's rendering of a fourteenth-century Cairene one — and was inaugurated by the Khedive Abbas Helmi at the end of December 1903. It took the name Museum of Islamic Art in 1951. It now holds something approaching a hundred thousand objects, drawn from Andalusia to India, which makes it, by most counts, the largest collection of its kind anywhere. I have walked past its façade. I have never been through its door.
On the twenty-fourth of January 2014 a car bomb went off at the police headquarters across the road. The museum's stone and carved wooden front was wrecked and one hundred and seventy-nine objects were broken. The restorers put back all but ten of them. When the galleries reopened in January 2017 — after work paid for by the Emirates, UNESCO, the United States and several European governments — the repaired pieces were returned to the cases carrying gold labels, so that you can see which things were shattered and mended. I have thought about that decision more than I have thought about anything else in this entry. Most institutions would have hidden the joins.
The rehang also enlarged the display substantially: additional halls, and several thousand objects out where before there had been a fraction of that. The arrangement is by material — textiles, ceramics, metalwork, glass, manuscripts, ivory, stone, coins — which is a nineteenth-century curator's habit that I usually distrust and here suspect is correct, because it is the materials that carry the argument across a thousand years and four thousand miles. I intend December, at opening, and a full morning, and I intend to walk from Ibn Tulun rather than arrive by car, because the twenty minutes between the two are the point of putting them on the same page.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.
A gold label on a mended object is a sentence the museum decided to say out loud.
One hundred and seventy-nine things were broken by a bomb meant for a building across the street. Ten of them could not be put back. The rest were, by people who spent three years on it, and the museum chose to mark them rather than let them pass as undamaged.
I have not seen those labels. I have only read about them, and I am aware that reading about them is not the same as standing in front of a fourteenth-century lamp and being told, in gold, what happened to it in 2014.
That is why the entry exists in this state rather than not existing. A place that refuses to hide its repairs deserves better than my silence while I get around to the journey.