Salam and hello

The Museum of Islamic Arts & Heritage (MIAH) Foundation is seeking your help to open a gallery dedicated to Islamic arts and heritage. We need to raise £12,500 to secure the lease of a gallery space.

Since our launch last year, the MIAH Foundation has held a mixture of online and in-person events on the arts and heritage of the Muslim world. These events were very well attended: our Community Iftar exhibition in the Great Hall was attended by almost 1100 in just three hours; some of our webinars exceeded the maximum 300 registrants; and when we released 60 places for a day of art workshops in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, the places were all booked within 24 hours. This is a testament to how much our work is needed in the West Midlands and its potential to serve local communities. Although we hope to continue and build on this over the next year, it has become increasingly clear that the best way to showcase our work, be easily accessible to the communities where we want to make a difference, and for people to learn about our long-term plans for the UK's first purpose-built museum dedicated to the arts and heritage of the Islamic world, is to have a physical space that serves as a showcase of our work.

The opportunity has arisen to lease a gallery space that can serve as a base for our foundation and also as a multi-functional space where we can hold public exhibitions on the history, arts and heritage of the Muslim world and invite schools and groups for history and heritage talks, art workshops and to host our Islamic Arts Circle lecture series. It would provide a snapshot of what a dedicated museum can offer. However, we need to raise the £12,500 needed to secure the lease. We are confident that if we have your vital support we can achieve this. If we are unable to secure the lease, we will offer you the option to have your donation refunded or saved to help us look for somewhere else.

We know from our discussions with local groups that our project is needed and wanted. With nearly 30% of Birmingham's population identifying as Muslim (around 330,000 people), and with many more in neighbouring West Midlands' cities, an Islamic arts and heritage gallery will offer the opportunity to create a programme of activities and exhibitions that takes into account the heritage of a large section of the city's population whose needs are not currently being met. It will also provide the opportunity to share the rich cultural, artistic and intellectual heritage with the wider audiences and schools groups.

You can find out more about our organisation and our team here: https://miahfoundation.com/our-story . Feel free to explore the website further via the menu to find details of our past and upcoming events, explore our directory of artists and see our digital exhibitions and essays section.

We would be very grateful if you could donate whatever you are able to help us reach our fundraising goal and secure the lease of the gallery.

UPDATE:

Thank you so much to everyone who has donated so far. To those just visiting this page, please donate whatever you can to help get this project off the ground. If we can even just get halfway to our goal, we might be able to negotiate raising the rest over the summer.