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David Khalili

High-ranking Iranian politicians have dubbed Khalili “the cultural ambassador of Islam”. His extraordinary collection of Islamic art is the largest in private hands with 20,000 items. He has just published an encyclopedic time chart of Islamic civilisation which he plans to distribute to the Muslim world and to 40,000 young people in British schools. And yet, Khalili, 61, is Jewish. Born in Iran, he moved to London in 1978 and started trading in property. He turned two dilapidated buildings in Kensington Palace Gardens into one of the most extraordinary houses in London, which is now owned by Lakshmi Mittal (qv). Khalili is working on an innovative energy-efficient 300,000sq ft office block at Holborn Viaduct. His company Favermead also owns property in Mayfair and Exeter. Most of the art was acquired before prices started to rise. When some of his masterpieces — 300 or so — go on show abroad, the insurance indemnity can run into hundreds of millions of pounds. Khalili has staged more than 35 exhibitions worldwide. Aside from Islamic art, he has been building other hugely valuable collections, including Japanese Meiji, Swedish textiles, Spanish damascene metalwork and enamels of the world. Despite the difficulty of valuing the Islamic collection, we tentatively put a £4.5 billion price on it, adding £800m for the other collections. All are owned by the Khalili family trust. Property and other assets are worth £500m, taking Khalili to £5,800m. He sees himself not as “owning” the art but as a steward of the collections, which he wants to house in new museums where the public can appreciate them. Khalili has spent £8m documenting the collection and writing about it, working with leading academics in each field. It is the largest art publication in the world by a single collector. Khalili is driven by a need to bridge the divide between the world’s religions. “Religion and politics have their own languages, but the language of art is universal. Never has there been a greater need for this universality,” he says.