STAYING POWER
There is a piece of cassiterite at the mim, the Mineral Museum in Beirut that is, by Salim Eddé’ s own admission, ugly. He has collected 2,400 minerals since— extraordinary specimens from 75 countries, some so rare they exist as single known examples of their kind— but this first stone, black and heavy and unremarkable to the untrained eye, remains on display. Not because it is beautiful. Because it is the beginning of the story.
That stone carries ID number one. And the story it begins is not just one man’ s story. It is the story of what happens when a private collector decides, quietly and without fanfare, that his collection belongs to the world.
THE GRANDMOTHER AND THE PHARAOH Eddé, co-founder and CEO of Murex— one of Lebanon’ s most successful international technology companies, with over 1,100 employees— speaks about mim with the same directness he applies to business. There is no mythology around the museum’ s founding. He was browsing a shop in Paris, bought a mineral because it fascinated him, and that was it.
“ It was purely accidental,” he says.“ I am totally unable to do anything with my hands— drawing, painting, or sculpting. So, when I see that in nature you have these things that come out without the intervention of anybody, well, obviously, I started collecting.”
Twenty years later, not a single piece of that collection sits in a box at home. Every one of mim’ s 2,400 minerals is exhibited, lit, mounted, and accompanied by the geological, historical, and chemical story behind it. Entry to the museum is free. It receives schoolchildren and scientists, three-year-olds and ninety-yearolds. In 2024, in a Beirut still recovering from economic collapse, political paralysis, and the aftermath of the port explosion, the mim welcomed 45,000 visitors— its best year on record.
When Eddé talks about how he moved from collector to founder, he invokes two guides from across the millennia. The first is his late grandmother:“ My grandson, nobody has ever taken anything into the afterlife.” The second is Tutankhamun, buried with his weapons and jewels— only for everything to end up in a museum anyway, several thousand years later.
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So, I thought I would skip one step and put everything in a museum before having the fate of Tutankhamun.
The anecdote is told with lightness— but it contains a serious idea. The collector’ s impulse, at its best, is not about possession. It is about recognition: that something beautiful or significant exists, that it deserves to be seen, and that one is, temporarily, its custodian.
“ When you start collecting, you have to be greedy, you have to be jealous,” he acknowledges.“ But then, as I showed these things to people, I found that people got a lot of interest in them. And then you have all the background— historical, geological, chemical, even economic. So I thought: let us create a museum to show not only the beauty, but also everything behind it.”
Salim Edde leading a visitors tour at mim
74 MATAHEF ISSUE 03