Culture & Heritage

Abu Dhabi is aspiring to become one of the world’s new culture capitals. Star architects have been commissioned to build the world’s most spectacular museums on an island just off the Arab metropolis.


In 1791, two events occurred that don’t seem to have much to do with one another - at least at first sight. The Bani Yas, a Bedouin tribe, discovered a freshwater spring by the Persian Gulf and founded a small settlement that eventually became the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Several thousand kms away, in Paris, the constituent assembly of post-revolutionary France issued a decree nationalising the royal art collection and announced the opening of a public museum in the Louvre. Now, 216 years later, the Louvre and Abu Dhabi suddenly have a lot in common.


Abu Dhabi’s royal family plans to buy a $650 million share of the Louvre. This will allow them to transfer several hundred artworks to the Arab metropolis for an initial term of 20 years. The art is to be exhibited in a planned new museum.


Whether it will be called the “Louvre Abu Dhabi” or something similarly intriguing, what will be built in the desert is far more than just a museum for classical art. Abu Dhabi’s national Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC) promises “a cultural asset for the world” and a “beacon for cultural experience and exchange,” in the words of Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi. The first tourist attractions will be available for viewing in 2012, and the entire project is scheduled for completion in 2018.


Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan has commissi-oned no less than four of the world’s most famous architects to create what promises to become one of the world’s most important cultural destinations: Frank O. Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid.


Just off Abu Dhabi lies Saadiyat Island - the name means “Island of Happiness” in Arabic - a 27 square kilometer (10.4 square mile) piece of land where Frank O. Gehry, who was born in 1929, is to build another Guggenheim Museum.

The Hagia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey (1453) was originally a Byzantine church built in the sixth century and after the Ottoman conquest in 1453, it served as a mosque for over four centuries.


A series of large calligraphic discs, installed in 1847-9, decorated the interior and they incorporate the names of the Prophet (Pbuh) and other early leaders.

“He is Allah, there is no God, but He. He is the King.” (59:23)


Allah owns the universe and controls it. “Blessed be He in whose hand is the Kingdom. He has power over everything.” (67:1). Allah is in need of nothing and of nobody. Yet, everybody and everything are in need of Him.