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His late Highness set the bar even higher, framing the Museum’ s purpose as contributing“ to a deeper understanding among cultures and the strength of pluralism, which is essential to peace and to progress in the world.” Every choice that followed— architectural, curatorial, and programmatic— has answered that aspiration.
The building itself carries the idea in its bones. Designed by Pritzker Prize – winning architect Fumihiko Maki, who passed away in 2024, the Museum is organized around the concept of nur, or light— a notion Al-Khamis describes as operating on two registers at once.“ Japanese architecture works a great deal with light, but from His late Highness’ s point of view, it was really emphasizing the spiritual and intellectual light in dialogue with the physical light— to emphasize that enlightenment was what the Museum was going to be about, and that people who came here would see the light beyond stereotypes and misconceptions.”
The Museum shares its site with the Ismaili Centre, designed by Charles Correa, and the Aga Khan Park, a formal garden by Lebanese landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic, drawing on the charbagh tradition of Humayun’ s Tomb and the Alhambra. Together, they form what Al-Khamis calls a“ garden of peace away from the noise of downtown Toronto”— and, crucially, a threshold. Programming often begins before a visitor even reaches the galleries: festivals, outdoor photography exhibitions, and open lawns designed for the unplanned encounters the Museum exists to create.
Even with a permanent collection of about 2,500 objects at the height of her tenure— modest by the standards of encyclopedic
museums— Al-Khamis insists that every piece, whether a manuscript, a ceramic, or a contemporary commission, was chosen to speak to two things at once: the achievements of Islamic civilizations in all their diversity, including contributions from non-Muslim communities, and the interconnectedness of those civilizations with cultures beyond the conventional East- West divide.
The choice of Toronto was not incidental.“ I think a project like that can succeed anywhere if the founder’ s vision is in dialogue with the realities on the ground,” Al-Khamis reflects.“ The reason it was put in Canada was that the gap between Muslim and non-Muslim civilizations was very pronounced in the wake of everything that happened in the early 2000s— and Canada, at the same time, was one place that tried to transcend that.” Proximity to the United States also mattered: from its founding, the Museum was conceived as“ a beacon of enlightenment and intercultural peacemaking across North America.”
Civilizations in Dialogue, Not in Isolation
The Museum’ s exhibition program treats the arts— visual and performing alike— as a single, holistic field rather than separate disciplines.“ For us, the visual arts are not conceptually separate from the intangible arts,” Al-Khamis says.“ Everything we do connects a display or an exhibition to our performing arts program, our educational initiatives, and our public programming.”
That philosophy plays out in exhibitions built to meet the moment. Game On!, which opened in April 2026 to coincide with Toronto’ s hosting of the FIFA World Cup, traced the
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