Tareq Rajab Museum

The Tareq Rajab Museum is a private museum of Islamic art in Jabriya, Kuwait. Its founders, the married couple Tareq S. Rajab and Jehan S. Rajab, opened it in 1980 in Tareq Rajab's villa, and it has never left that site. The couple built the collection over some sixty years, buying on road trips across the Middle East and at London sales. It now holds about thirty thousand objects, with around ten thousand on permanent view.

The original building shows Qur'ans and manuscripts from the Umayyad era to the Qajars, along with ceramics, glass, metalwork, arms and armour, and the bronze door of Sultan Barquq. About five years after the opening, it added Jehan Rajab's collection of jewellery, costume and musical instruments. Silver folk jewellery, textiles and embroidery are also on show. A Gold Room sits alongside a small selection of nineteenth century Orientalist paintings. The Hattin Diorama, made in 2023 by Tareq Nader Rajab, retells the Battle of Hattin with 3,500 painted miniatures.

A second site, the Tareq Rajab Museum of Islamic Calligraphy, opened nearby in 2007. It presents Arabic script on paper, ceramics, metal, glass and cloth, with works from Yaqut Al-Musta'simi, Hafiz Osman and Sheikh Hamdullah Al-Amasi. Four curtains from the door of the Kaaba stand at its centre, and a Chinese Room holds Islamic calligraphy from China. One ticket admits visitors to both buildings. Temporary exhibitions are staged in the Dar El Cid Exhibition Halls, which the founders built in 2001.