My trip to The Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization!
As most of you will know by now, especially if you watch my vlogs, I love museums. When I was looking at museums to visit in the UAE, the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization (which I will now refer to as SMIC) stood out to me as one of the most well maintained and interesting museums near RAK, so in this post I decided to visit it.
SMIC is located on the Corniche St. in the heart of Sharjah, and it is pretty hard to miss with its traditional Arab design and the shining gold dome standing tall in the middle of a fully industrialized city. The SMIC was originally opened in the Sharjah heritage area which is basically just another museum dedicated to the cultural achievements of the UAE in 1996, but then ended up being moved to the building it is in now -- a former traditional Souq or market location where it opened in 2008 and has been going strong ever since then, keeping up with technology and constantly making changes to improve the visitors' experience.
Although different websites disagree on exactly how many official rooms the museum has and even though the official website says it has seven rooms, I think it has nine so I am going to just go with my personal opinion even if it may be wrong (I think it isn't worth too much argument). My self-ordained nine rooms consist of the section for the Islamic faith, the section for inventions and inventors in the Islamic empire, the section for temporary displays, and the cafeteria which are all on the ground floor; then galleries 1-4 which are on the first floor and finally the dome which is on the second floor. We did not follow a set order on our trip there so I will be writing this post as we saw it.
When you first enter the museum as with most museums the first thing you see is the reception desk where you get your tickets and the optional listening tour. To either side of you there are long hallways filled with small display cases containing some random memorabilia from the Muslim empire including an elephant clock, which will be recognized by any of you who have read my Ibn Battuta mall post. On the right are the Muslim faith and Islamic discoveries rooms and then on your left are the temporary displays room and the cafeteria. Although we did decide to accept the listening tour for our visit we didn't use it throughout the whole museum because most of the information they provided was already shown in front of the displays.
The first room we went into was the section about the Muslim faith, and although I did think that the set up and the way they displayed everything in that section was great, it was really created for someone who is new to Islam so I already knew most of it, which meant that I didn't get that much out of it even though it was a good exhibition.
The second room we stopped by was the room about Islamic inventions and this was my favorite room because of a few things. Firstly it had a lot of things that I didn't already know and it was fascinating to learn about some of the insane things that were invented and ideas that were thought up in the Islamic world that never got recognized because they were hidden from western culture for the bulk of their technological and scientific boom; such as the Muslim scholar named Al Biruni in the Ghazana area who discovered that the earth revolved around the sun six hundred years before Galileo. Secondly it was super interactive with everything from astronomical equipment that you could touch and learn how to use to miniature recreations of inventions that would start moving and showing what they did when you pressed a button to touch screens that had an insane amount of information. And thirdly it wasn't too big so you wouldn't get drowned in a huge amount of displays as is the case in some museums.
So after getting our minds blown we went upstairs to the first floor to go through galleries one, two, three, and four which were basically just places for them to put all the extra artifacts and displays that didn't fit into any of the officially titled rooms. While these rooms were just like any normal museum galleries and I can't find a whole lot special or crazy to say about them, I still really enjoyed them and there were lots and lots of interesting things to look at and wonder about.
Then we went up to the second floor which did not span the whole length of the museum like the other two floors but instead just had a medium-sized sitting area with a bunch of couches under the dome. The interesting thing about this part of the museum is that the inside of the dome has been painted with the different zodiac signs and constellations so you can sit back in one of their extremely comfy couches and gaze up at the beautiful mosaic style zodiac paintings, which I think is really neat.
Lastly we went back down to the ground floor and discovered that we had missed the temporary exhibit, which turned out to be an exhibit on Arabic calligraphy from Malaysia. We went into that just to see what it had to offer and as you might expect from the title it was just a room with a bunch of calligraphy paintings and some moody lighting, but the paintings were nothing to scoff at and I think that it's cool that they have a room like that which they keep changing every so often keeping the museum fresh. Across from the temporary exhibition room was the cafeteria and gift shop which we did pop into and unsurprisingly were what you would expect a cafeteria and gift shop to be like, a place where you can buy over-priced food and trinkets.
So that does it! All in all I really liked the museum and I would highly suggest it to anyone who is interested in the Islamic religion, culture, or history. Thanks for taking out the time to read this post and joining me in my experience, and I hope to see you all next time.