Nasser Khalili

Sir Nasser David Khalili (born 18 December 1945) is an Iranian-born British scholar, collector and philanthropist, born in Isfahan. He assembled the eight Khalili Collections of some 35,000 works, including the largest private collection of Islamic art in the world, took his PhD at SOAS in 1988 and endowed its first chair of Islamic art, was knighted in 2020 for services to interfaith relations and charity, and was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2012. ¹

Khalili was born in Isfahan on 18 December 1945, the fourth of five children, to a Jewish family of art dealers and traders of artefacts, and the family moved to Tehran when he was a few months old. ^{1 2} The Art Gallery of New South Wales' exhibition biography describes the man himself as "a Jew himself", and the Urdu and Arabic articles likewise describe him as a Jewish scholar and as a Jew born in Iran. ^{3 4 5} He moved to the United States in 1967, took a degree in computer science at Queens College, New York, settled in London in 1978, and completed a PhD on Islamic lacquerware at SOAS in 1988. ¹

Since the 1970s Khalili has assembled eight collections, covering Islamic art, Hajj and the arts of pilgrimage, Aramaic documents, Japanese art of the Meiji period, Japanese kimono, Swedish textiles, Spanish damascened metalwork and enamels of the world, together some 35,000 objects documented in more than a hundred published volumes. ¹ In 1989 he endowed the Nasser D. Khalili Chair of Islamic Art and Archaeology at SOAS, the first of its kind, and later funded a research centre in Islamic art at Oxford. ¹ Through the Khalili Foundation, founded as the Maimonides Foundation in 1995, he promotes understanding between Jews, Christians and Muslims. ^{1 3} He was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2012, knighted in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to interfaith relations and charity, and received the Freedom of the City of London in 2025. ¹

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