We had the honour, recently, of welcoming His Excellency the former Minister of Finance, Mr Mahmoud Abdulkhaliq Al-Nouri, to Alothman Mosque in Al-Nuqra. He came to see the mosque following the restoration and rehabilitation works it has undergone, and his presence lent the occasion a warmth that the occasion would not otherwise have had. With characteristic generosity, he arrived bearing a gift, two volumes of a work he himself produced, titled “Coins in Circulation in the Islamic World from the First to the Ninth Century of the Hijri Calendar”, published by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters. It is, in every sense, the fruit of a lifetime.
Bou Khalid, as he is known to those close to him, requires no introduction to anyone who has followed the arc of Kuwait’s economic history. He graduated from the Faculty of Economics at Kuwait University in 1971, went on to work at the Middle East Bank and later at the United Bank of Bahrain, and served on the boards of several major financial institutions before being appointed Minister of Finance, a post he held from 2003 to 2005. He was known as a reformer with a clear direction of travel, a strong advocate for empowering the private sector and for encouraging young Kuwaitis to build their own enterprises, particularly small and medium sized businesses.
But alongside a distinguished career in public finance, Bou Khalid cultivated a private passion of a quite different kind the collection of rare Islamic coins. These small metal discs struck in gold, silver, and copper across a thousand years of Islamic civilisation are, in the right hands, something closer to testimony than to currency. His collection grew steadily over many years until it numbered more than five hundred pieces. For five years, the collection was on permanent display at the Kuwait National Museum. It was then entrusted to the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters, which commissioned a scholarly study and catalogue of the entire collection, ultimately publishing it in the two-volume work he presented to us.
The task of authorship was assigned to Dr Hamid Mutlaq Al-Mutairi, who approached it with rigorous academic method, classifying each coin by period, region, and material, and documenting it with photographs, precise measurements, and references to authoritative international sources. The result is a work of genuine scholarly distinction.
To browse the collection is to move through Islamic history in a way that no textbook quite replicates. Each piece carries its own story. There are silver dirhams struck under Ziyad ibn Abi Sufyan. There are coins from the era of the Companion Abdullah ibn Al-Zubayr, on which he added the phrase “Praise be to God” a theological statement pressed into metal. Among the rarest pieces in the entire collection are dirhams of the Azariqa Kharijites, led by Qatari ibn al-Fuja’a, bearing their defiant motto, “Judgement belongs to God alone.” There are also coins from the rule of Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf Al-Thaqafi, dinars and dirhams of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik, the remarkably varied coins of Harun Al-Rashid with their changing inscriptions and titles, and dirhams of Al-Ma’mun that quietly encode the tensions of his bitter conflict with his brother.
What makes the book particularly great is the author’s decision not to present each coin in isolation. He precedes every entry with a biographical account of the ruler or figure associated with it, so that the reader finds themselves moving through history not through treaties and chronicles but through small metal objects that once passed between human hands across entire continents. The deepest argument of the book is also its most quietly radical one that a thousand years of Islamic history can be read from a piece of metal no wider than a few centimetres.
Among the passages that held my attention most was the account of how Islamic coinage itself came into being. When the early Islamic state was established in Medina, the Muslims had no monetary system of their own. They used what they inherited, Persian silver dirhams and Byzantine gold dinars. This continued until the year 77 AH, when the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan issued the first purely Islamic dinar, struck in Damascus a moment at which a civilisation announced its economic as well as its spiritual sovereignty.
We thank Abu Khalid for honouring us with his visit, and for a gift that will remain long after the occasion that prompted it. We pray for his health, his continued wellbeing, and the ongoing flourishing of a contribution to Kuwait’s cultural and historical heritage that is, in itself, a form of custodianship.
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