On the riverside of the fifth arrondissement, facing the île Saint-Louis, stands a building whose south front is made of 240 metal moucharabiehs, and every moucharabieh is a diaphragm that opens and closes like the one in a camera. Inside, on three floors and 2,400 square metres, the museum of the Institut du monde arabe brings together things almost no museum keeps in the same room: ancient archaeology, Islamic art, objects of daily use and contemporary work.
The reason this article appears now is that time is short. From the summer of 2027 the museum closes for about a year and reopens in 2028 completely rehung, around a gift of almost two thousand works. The institute’s temporary exhibitions will stay open during the works, the permanent collection will not.
What is an astrolabe written in Latin doing in a museum of the Arab world?
Let’s begin!
1. Why you will not see a photograph of the building here
Why does searching for this museum online turn up mostly drawings?
It is worth saying at once, because it is the first thing you notice scrolling through this page. The building is by Jean Nouvel, who is alive, and in France freedom of panorama excludes commercial uses: a site with affiliate links like this one is a commercial use, so you will not find the facade photographed here. You have to imagine it, or go.
It is worth telling you about all the same, because it is half the reason for coming. The institute was inaugurated on 30 November 1987 by François Mitterrand, to a design by Jean Nouvel with Gilbert Lézénès, Pierre Soria and Architecture-Studio. The 240 moucharabiehs of the south wall were meant to open and close on their own following the sun, driven by photoelectric cells; the cells gave trouble, and today the movement fires at every change of the hour. The institute does not publish this detail, Wikipédia documents it, and it is why that wall sometimes looks still to you.
2. A museum you visit going down
This is the second practical thing, and no sign at the entrance says it loudly enough: the route starts at the top. Take the lift to the seventh floor and walk down. The sections run like this: Birth of an identity on levels 7 and 6, From the gods to God on 6, and then all the rest on 4, with Walking in an Arab city, The expressions of beauty and The body, the self and the other. Temporary exhibitions almost always take a mezzanine on level 5, which you meet on the way.
The museum is not crowded, and the institute itself publishes the figure: in 2025 it had 142,456 visitors. Under 26 you go in free, and the terrace on the top floor, from which you see the apse of Notre-Dame, is free for everyone.
3. The leaf of the blue Quran
A parchment dyed dark blue, with the text traced in gold in wide, squared kufic letters, with no vowel marks. The passage is sura IV, the one about Women, and if you look at the left margin you will see a circular medallion, faded now: it marked the end of a verse. The work comes from Tunisia, probably from Kairouan, and it dates between the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth century.
The blue Quran was an enormous manuscript, broken up long ago. Most of the leaves stayed in Tunisia, at the Bardo museum in Tunis and at the one in Raqqada near Kairouan; the others ended up in Dublin, in New York, in Abu Dhabi and in cases like this one. Stop and think what making it meant: parchment dyed by immersion and gold laid on every letter, for a whole book. This is not decoration, it is a statement of what that text was worth, and you grasp it without needing to read a line of Arabic.
4. The astrolabes, and the one that is not Arab
If you have never handled one, an astrolabe is an analogue calculator: it measures the height of the stars, tells you the time, orients you and establishes the direction of prayer. The one in the photograph is a planispheric brass astrolabe, inventory AI 86-45: it hangs from a ring on a red cord, it has the graduated scale engraved on the rim and, above the disc of coordinates, the pierced rete with the curved points that mark the stars.
The astronomical instruments came to the museum with the Marcel Destombes bequest of 1986, and among them is one that is not Arab at all. It is engraved in Latin, and it comes from Catalonia, or from Italy, or from Sicily, or perhaps from France. It is dated by reading the position of the stars on the rete, and eleven of those positions match the year 980. If the calculation holds, it is the oldest surviving astrolabe in Europe, the material proof that Arab science was passing into the West earlier than the textbooks say. It was Destombes himself who first described it, in 1962. The museum label leaves every question mark where it stands, and that is an honest way to present an object.
5. Rostam and Puladvand, a leaf from the Shâh Nâme
A leaf of a Persian manuscript with the text set in columns and, at the bottom, a miniature on a gold ground. The scene is a fight: two bearded men grip each other in the middle, one in yellow trousers and the other in grey, while on the left a figure in a pink robe and on the right a figure in a green robe hold two horses and watch. It is the hero Rostam wrestling hand to hand with the demon Puladvand, an episode from the Shâh Nâme, the Book of Kings by the Persian poet Ferdowsi.
Look at how the page is built, because it is the opposite of what you expect from a miniature: the text is not a caption to the image and the image does not illustrate the text. They take up the same space with the same weight, and the writing enters the sheet as an element of the design. The museum owns at least a second leaf of the same poem, from the Baghdad school in the sixteenth century, with Alexander the Great looking for the fountain of life.
6. The basin of caliph al-Mustanjid
What is the name of a caliph doing on a basin for washing your hands?
The object that opens this page is a copper alloy basin, chased and inlaid with black paste, made in Cairo between 1455 and 1479. The rim is very widely flared and notched, and the cylindrical body carries a band of cartouches with an engraved inscription: the name of caliph al-Mustanjid.
In fifteenth-century Cairo the Abbasid caliph governed nothing: all the power belonged to the Mamluk sultans, who kept the caliph in the city as a guarantee of religious legitimacy. An everyday object engraved with his name is therefore not a mark of ownership, it is a piece of propaganda that passed from hand to hand, in a palace where everyone knew how things really stood.
7. The perfume flask, and Islamic glass
This is a small object, and easy to walk past for that reason: a perfume flask in dark glass, with a narrow neck and a square-sectioned base, decorated with a pale feather pattern that runs right round the belly.
Get close to the glass, because that pattern, from the way it looks, comes from threads of pale glass laid on the dark body and then combed with a pointed tool while they are still hot. It is work that cannot be corrected: either it comes out at the first attempt or you start again. The Mediterranean had known the technique since antiquity, and Islamic glassmakers carried it on for centuries. The flask is shown in the section given over to the body, and the reason is the right one: perfume, in these societies, was no showcase luxury, it was hygiene, medicine and hospitality at once.
8. The hammam, the banquet table and the music
The last section is called The body, the self and the other, and it begins with a case on the veil, which the museum presents at once for what it is: not a religious marker, as today’s debate would have you believe, but an object with a long and shifting history.
Then you find an installation on the hammam, with the real products and objects, which reconstructs its stages and explains its social function. And there is the banquet table, laid, which says something simple: in Arab societies hospitality is measured by the shared meal and by the entertainment you offer your guest afterwards. It is no accident that the route ends on the music, learned and popular, which you listen to on headphones.
9. Why come now, and not in two years
The institute writes it itself. Between 2018 and 2022 the French-Lebanese collectors Claude and France Lemand gave almost two thousand works of modern and contemporary art by Arab artists. That gift changed the scale of the museum: the IMA now owns the most important collection of modern and contemporary art of the Arab world that exists in the West.
Showing it needs a new museum, and that is the museum you will see if you come back in two years. The practice PROJECTILES won the competition, beating four finalists out of twenty-four entries; the works are worth 18 million euros, they begin in the summer of 2027 and should last a year; the opening is announced for 2028. What you see now is the arrangement born of the 2012 revision, and from next summer it no longer exists.
Practical information
Details checked on 26 September 2026 on the official site imarabe.org. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The museum costs 10 euros from the age of 26 up. Groups of six to nine people pay 7 euros each. Temporary exhibitions have a ticket of their own. Free admission. Entry is free for the under-26s, on production of a document, and for disabled visitors with their companion. The library, the bookshop and the terrace on the top floor are free as well. Opening hours. The institute opens Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 to 18:00, and on Saturday, Sunday and public holidays from 10:00 to 19:00. The desks close 45 minutes earlier. Closing days. It closes on Mondays and on 1 May. Attention: the museum closes for works from the summer of 2027 and reopens in 2028. The institute’s temporary exhibitions stay open while the building site runs. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is included in the pass, together with the Musée des Arts et Métiers. You can get the pass here. Getting there. The entrance is at place Mohammed-V, 1 rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard. The stops are Jussieu, on lines 7 and 10, and Cardinal Lemoine, on line 10. How long it takes. You walk the museum in an hour and a half. The terrace asks for ten minutes and costs nothing.
The exhibitions on at the institute, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Five minutes on foot, going up towards the Sorbonne, is the Musée de Cluny, which tells the story of the same Middle Ages seen from the other side of the Mediterranean. Across the Seine, the Musée du Louvre has a department of Islamic art that is the natural term of comparison for this collection. Staying in the fifth arrondissement you will find the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution and the Musée Curie, and if what you are after is non-European art, the Musée du quai Branly and the Musée Guimet complete the round.
Photo credits: basin of caliph al-Mustanjid by Ted1968 (CC0); leaf of the blue Quran by Francesco Bini, Sailko (CC BY-SA 4.0); planispheric astrolabe by Pom² (CC BY-SA 3.0); leaf of the Shâh Nâme by Popolon (CC BY-SA 4.0); perfume flask by Caroline Léna Becker (CC BY 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
