The best museum in Kuala Lumpur by a distance, and one of the best of its kind anywhere.
If you do one museum in Kuala Lumpur, do this one. It opened in 1998, it holds around 10,000 objects, and it is the largest museum of Islamic art in Southeast Asia — but the numbers are not the point.
The point is that it covers the whole Islamic world, deliberately including China, India, Southeast Asia and the Malay world alongside the Middle East, at a moment when most collections elsewhere treat “Islamic art” as meaning Persian, Arab and Ottoman with a footnote.
The building
Purpose-built, in white stone, with five domes — the inner ones decorated by Iranian craftsmen brought in for the work, in tilework and muqarnas of a standard you do not often see outside Isfahan.
The interiors are light, generous and cool, which after an hour walking in Kuala Lumpur is itself a service.
The galleries
The architecture gallery is the room people remember. Large, meticulous scale models of the great mosques and monuments — the Dome of the Rock, the Taj Mahal, the Great Mosque of Xi’an, Samarkand, the Alhambra, the Selimiye — arranged so you can walk between them and see the whole tradition at once.
The Qur’an and manuscript gallery — calligraphy from across a millennium, including Chinese Qur’ans in a script that fuses Arabic with Chinese brushwork.
The China gallery and the India gallery, both substantial, and both unusual.
The Malay World gallery — the reason the museum matters most locally. Kris blades, textiles, woodcarving, jawi manuscripts, and the specific forms Islam took in the archipelago.
Also: arms and armour, jewellery, textiles, ceramics, coins and seals, and a Living Faith gallery on the practice of Islam.
Two reconstructed rooms — an Ottoman room from Syria and an Indian room, both installed complete.
Practical
Charged, and modestly — one of the better-value tickets in the city.
Closed some public holidays; check.
The museum shop is genuinely good, and the restaurant is one of the nicer lunches in central KL, serving Middle Eastern and Malay food in a quiet room.
Half a day if you read. Two hours is a fast pass.
It is a few minutes from Masjid Negara, the National Museum and the Lake Gardens, and the four together make an excellent day — with the caveat that the walking between them is hot and largely unshaded.
More Museums
National Museum
Muzium Negara — the whole country in four galleries, and the right first stop if you know nothing about Malaysia.
National Textile Museum
Songket, batik and the kain in a striped Moorish-revival building of 1905, and it costs almost nothing.
Ilham Gallery
Free contemporary Malaysian art in a Foster tower, and the most serious exhibition programme in the country.