Saad Al-Jadir

I am the owner, collector and curator of the Collection, and the author of several specialized books and articles on Islamic silver. I started my Collection in 1958, when I acquired my first silver piece in Baghdad: a contemporary brooch of a portrait of Qassem, the revolutionary leader of Iraq.
I continued collecting while working as an architect planner, and it was during that period that I realised that this specialized form of Islamic metalwork had been largely ignored, both by art historians and by museums, and that great quantities of Islamic silver artefacts were simply being melted down and converted into plain ingots. Therefore, my main purpose in building this Collection has been to preserve, for future generations, a beautiful cultural record of

human expression in the hope that we might acquire a better understanding of the true nature of the people who made and used these silver items. With the publication of my first book, Arab and Islamic Silver (London, 1981), the subject of Islamic silver art was introduced for the first time. The Collection has enjoyed six major international exhibitions – in Lisbon, Khartoum, Riyadh, Stockholm, Kuala Lumpur and London. Since 1979 it has been kept in a bank vault in Switzerland. An important aspect of Islamic silver is that the artefacts have been created using a precious material that is of high value in itself, a value that promises to increase in world markets – unlike other art media such as wood, paper, clay or glass.