Draft:Academy of Palestinian and Arab Museology

• Comment: Potentially notable but needs a wider range of reliable, secondary sources. The same source is cited three individual times. Parts of the article are unsourced. Also likely generated partially or entirely with an LLM. Rambley (talk) 11:19, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

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The Academy of Palestinian and Arab Museology is a non-profit private institution founded by Mathaf Aydi Tarabin in 2022 in Paris. It is a research center for academics, professionals and ethnographic collectors around the world, dedicated to safeguarding Palestinian culture and heritage and promoting Palestinian Museology.

The legacy of this institution comes from the vision of a lineage of women from the Aydi Tarabin tribe from the Naqab who were in charge of the museum “Heritage from the Fragrance of the Land” since 1790. The focus of the academy is to preserve the past and heal the present while actively working towards a prosperous future. It aims to promote knowledge and heal memory by linking physical health to the preservation of cultural identity, following the principle of a sound mind in a sound body and the idea that transmitted memory is a form of living wisdom.These principles are the main axes of Palestinian Museology.

Purpose of the school

The Academy of Palestinian and Arab Museology is a research center for students and researchers, museum workers and ethnographic collectors around the world, interested to safeguard, study and contribute to the academic research on Palestinian Museology.

Palestinian Museology is an academic concept created in 1790 by the Aydi Tarabin family and institutionalized since the year 2000. It defines the narrative, didactic, pedagogical, philosophical, and scientific orientation, as well as the technical, legal, and administrative organization of collections related to Palestinian heritage. It comprises Palestine’s material and immaterial culture. It is an independent field within the broader discipline of specialized museology. This approach is tailored to the unique characteristics of Palestine—its cultural heritage, history, identity, and socioeconomic context. Its aim is to theorize the roles of Palestinian museums and to implement practical methods for achieving these roles. Palestinian museology seeks to preserve the past and care for the present in the interest of humanity’s well-being, in the same way that medicine heals the body, and to actively work toward a prosperous future for humanity. It assigns a meaningful place to Palestinian museology within museums, who often lack sufficient information about Palestinian heritage, but also often categorize Palestinian heritage objects under vague, general, or even entirely inaccurate labels.

The institution aims to enhance awareness and understanding of Palestinian cultural and material heritage, so that both the general public and academic circles can rely on it to protect and promote Palestinian cultural identity.

Its goal is to safeguard and promote Palestinian heritage for future generations as part of humanity’s shared legacy by advancing research, education, and international collaboration. Through a focus on museological sciences, it seeks to equip future generations with a solid academic foundation, encourage exploration of ancestral heritage, and cultivate leadership, creativity, and excellence in cultural preservation—all in the service of fostering peace and intercultural understanding.

The creation of the ICOM Palestine committee in 2025 through the joint efforts of ICOM Paris, the Academy of Palestinian and Arab Museology and the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities serve as a catalyst for the study, documentation, and preservation of Palestinian national heritage within museums on an international scale.

Academy spaces

The Academy houses a part of the collection “Heritage from the Fragrance of the Land”, saved after 1948. The museum comprises ethnographic objects from Palestine since the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and up to 1948, mainly 250 embroidered women and men dresses from different regions in Palestine, jewelry and amulets, stamps, coins,mother-of-pearl art pieces, vases, ceramics and paintings by Shehab Kawasmi presenting Palestine in the Ottoman era. Its coins encompass the Phoenician and Canaanite periods, as well as the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic eras.

The Academy also features an academic library center and archive with over 1,000 books in twelve languages on Palestine’s cultural heritage from the 17^th and 20^th century as well as in-depth study of the collection pieces. Traditional medical books present in Palestine since the 17^Th century are also present. It also contains a publishing house dedicated to the publication of studies and research on Palestinian heritage and culture, with the aim of developing and institutionalizing Palestinian and Arab museology and gaining international recognition for this field as an academic discipline. Several governments and universities in Europe and Asia have recognized this concept since the year 2000.

Fields of researsh

The Academy’s main fields of research are Palestinian embroideries, jewelry and amulets. Its secondary research focuses on coins and stamps used in Palestine at all periods in time, Ottoman archives (books, newspapers, photographs, official certificates),paintings, mother-of-pearl and wooden sculptures on Palestinian culture.  

The Academy contributes to advancing academic and scientific research on the various types and categories of Palestinian objects. It conducts in-depth studies of items held in the Academy's museum, as well as of objects preserved in other museums and private collections.

A significant area of focus of the research center is the compilation and study of archives that present Palestine through its many identities as well as through the perspective of experts on Middle Eastern studies from different periods and countries. This understanding helps Palestinians develop a vision about themselves, reflecting the unique context of Palestine as an integral part of humanity’s shared heritage, and allows the population and academic circles to build on what has already been produced to protect and enhance the Palestinian cultural identity.

Recognitions and official support

The Academy of Palestinian and Arab Museology has been officially recognized and supported by many institutions worldwide: the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the Permanent Delegation of the State of Palestine to UNESCO in December 2022, the Palestinian National Commission for Education, Culture and Science and the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in April 2023,Dr. Dawwas Dawwas, Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Commission for Education, Culture and Science, and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Islamic Organization for Education, the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in France in December 2022, the Biruni university in Istanbul, Turkey in September 2022 among others.

Furthermore, since the year 2000, the field of Palestinian museology has begun to gain academic recognition, with institutional integration emerging in various international universities, including those in Russia, Japan, France, and Switzerland.