After years of restoration work on its fine neo-Mameluke buildings and exhibitions of Islamic art, Cairo’s Museum of Islamic Art is close to reopening to the public.
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“One challenge that faced Porta and his team from the SCA and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture was how safely to dismantle the fountain from its cement base and transport and relocate it at the restoration lab at the Citadel without further destruction,” Abdel-Fattah said. During the dismantling and restoration process, Porta and his team removed almost three tonnes of material used in earlier attempts to restore the fountain and corrected the harmful effects of previous attempts at restoration.
According to Abdel-Fattah, the overall museum restoration project has achieved three goals. It has brought light into the museum’s galleries by enlarging the size of the windows, and it has replaced old display cases with new state-of-the-art ones providing a far better display environment for the artefacts. Thirdly, the project has reorganised the display of the collection and highlighted a successful example of international cooperation, with work being carried out jointly with the Islamic Department of the Louvre in Paris and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which helped in the restoration of several larger items.
Ismailimail 
Mid-April 2010: Islamic art Museum still not reopened after being closed for 5 years (and how many years of real restoration works?).
No information panel on reopening date. Nobody able to give the least information except a military guard who does not speak one word of English. No museum website.
This hiding of Islamic art treasures for such a long period does not support the present Egyptian policy to recover Egyptian works of art from foreign museums…
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