When looking back on the history of the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, this is the most difficult year to encapsulate. In the first seven months, the DAI hosted two exhibitions at the Kuwait National Museum, Masterpieces from the Hermitage, for which the organization also published the book Masterpieces of Islamic Art in the Hermitage Museum, and Handicrafts of Daghestan. DAI objects continued to be admired in Paris at L’Institut de Monde Arabe exhibitions and in the United States, as Romance of the Taj Mahal travelled to the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, then later, to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. Professor Abdullah el-Tayib finished the first part of Al-Murshid (Volume 4), which the DAI published in May. Finally, work on the DAI’s first travelling exhibition, Islamic Art and Patronage: Treasures from Kuwait, was drawing to a close and it was obvious that it would be an outstanding exhibition.

1990 was going to be a very good year . . . until it wasn’t. The Iraqi invasion in August 1990 and the subsequent plundering of the Kuwait National Museum in the last quarter had a chilling effect on the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah at home, where the safety of the community was more important than any scheduled activities.

But abroad, it was different; abroad, it ignited a fiery determination in the DAI team in St Petersburg, Russia setting up Islamic Art and Patronage: Treasures from Kuwait (IAP), due to open at the Hermitage Museum on 6 August. That same determination was evident in the Kuwaitis – in and outside Kuwait, in government representatives in their posts in foreign countries and in friends of the DAI around the world. The idea of not opening the exhibition or going ahead with plan to have it travel the world was nothing more than a puff of air that lasts but a second.

August 1990, almost changed everything. In the end though what it changed most was attitude, as the objects loaned to exhibitions outside Kuwait and the hundreds of objects in Islamic Arts and Patronage: Treasures from Kuwait became symbols of defiance; ambassadors that reminded the world that there was more to Kuwait than that which was stolen.