Through its exhibition "A golden treasure, the dinar in all its states", the Institute of the Arab World presents a collection of coins for the first time revealed to the public.
Money, the first instrument of trade, is also a formidable means of communication that affirms both an identity and an authority.
The collection presented here contains nearly 1,100 pieces, many of which are rare or even unique; it tells the complex story of the civilization of Islam.
While in the Arabian peninsula it had not been minted currency some 500 years before the advent of Islam, the caliph Abd al-Malik, the fifth ruler of the first Muslim hereditary dynasty, the Umayyads, promulgated Arabic as the language of the administration and established, as early as 77H/696, a mintage devoid of figurative representations, with only inscriptions proclaiming the belief in a single God and the date of the striking. The name of the sovereign and that of the monetary workshop will complete the legends of dinars from the middle of the ninth century. After the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, this principle remained in use while the sultans, shahs, emirs, emperors or viziers all beat money, from North Africa to India. Dinars are true miniature treasures of Arabic script and calligraphy in the diversity of its styles. Nevertheless, the Ottoman sultans in Turkey, the Safavid shahs then qajars in Iran, the Mughal emperors in India, sometimes reintroduce on their dinars the portrait of the sovereign or the figurative emblem of their power.