IT IS the world’s earliest dated carpet, one of the largest and finest made and thought to have been commissioned in 1539 by the Shah of Persia for the shrine of his ancestor in the town of Ardabil. For almost 50 years it hung on the wall in the V&A’s Islamic gallery, sombre and poorly lit. Now the huge Ardabil carpet is back where it can be seen — on the floor, spectacularly illuminated from above by a canopy and surrounded by a glazed screen, the intricate floral pattern woven by 30 million knots stretching across its 10m by 5m expanse.

The carpet, described by William Morris as a design of “singular perfection”, is the centrepoint of the V&A’s magnificent new Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, which opens to the public tomorrow. The new gallery has transformed the gloomy postwar display space into a brilliant exhibition of some of the world’s most spectacular treasures.

Centred between two aisles of columns, the carpet stretches the length of the showcases on the wall that lead visitors from the sacred to the temporal, from mosque to palace, and through the Arab, Persian and Ottoman art methodically assembled in the late Victorian times to demonstrate good design to British craftsmen.

Of the V&A’s 10,000 items in its Islamic holdings, 400 of the most spectacular are now on display — 100 more than previously. They include decorative tiled friezes of calligraphy, embroidered robes, mosque lamps, swords, daggers, ceramics, fabrics, caskets, a dazzling transparent rock crystal ewer, an Ottoman chimney piece, huge vellum Korans and a wooden minbar (pulpit) — 6m high and inlaid with ivory — bought from a Cairo mosque.

During the gallery’s two-year rebuilding the pick of the exhibits have been on tour to Washington, Texas, Tokyo and Sheffield. The tour and the new gallery cost £5.4 million, donated by Muhammad Jameel, a Saudi businessman, in honour of his parents and to demonstrate, without any political message, the artistic glories of his faith.

Softroom, the London-based firm of architects that designed the gallery, has left plenty of room for visitors to circulate — and the result is that it is the brightest and best of those the V&A has been steadily rebuilding and modernising. It will be seen by many of the museum’s two million visitors this year. This will make London, and the V&A in particular, one of the top world sites for Islamic art.

All the items shown were purchased between 1852 and 1909, as emissaries of the newly established museum scoured the Muslim world to find the best representative examples of Muslim design since the era of the Caliphate in the 8th and 9th centuries. None is subject to a claim of repatriation.

The rebuilding has transformed their display. The ceiling has been opened up to reveal the original roof, painted midnight blue — the dominant colour chosen to set off exhibits such as metalwork and reflect the blue pigments in many of the ceramics and the centralcolour of the Ardabil carpet. The exposed wall surfaces are in pale green. It is a transformation of a dusty and dowdy gallery into a magnificent showcase of an artistic civilisation that has been at the heart of Muslim faith and influence across the world for more than a thousand years.

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