Prince Walid gives to charity $100 million a year.

PARIS , July 27, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Saudi billionaire Prince Al-Walid Bin Talal has donated a multi-million-euro gift to finance the construction of a new Islamic art wing in the Paris-based Louvre Museum to show off the bright face of the Muslim world.

The 4,000-square-meter wing in the world's largest museum will showcase up to 10,000 pieces, one of the greatest concentrations of Islamic art in existence, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported Wednesday, July 27.

Financed by 17 million euros from the Saudi business tycoon, the Islamic art wing is designed by architects Mario Bellinin from Italy and Rudi Ricciotti from France . It is scheduled to open in 2009.

Only some 1,300 objects from the Louvre's Islamic collection are currently on display.

The new rooms will have 36,000 square feet of display space, about four times the current area.

The donation is one of the biggest cultural gifts in France 's history.

"Your gesture is a testament to the generosity of the Islamic world," the French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres told Prince Walid in a ceremony on Tuesday, July 26.

"Exceptional Collection"

The French government will also contribute 26 million euros ($41.24 million) and the oil giant Total will add four million euros ($6.35 million) to complete the construction.

French President Jacques Chirac's office said in a statement that the president was “particularly attached” to the project.

“It will create a new space for this ‘exceptional collection’ and reinforce the avocation of the Louvre -- which houses such priceless treasures as Leonardo da Vinci's ‘Mona Lisa’ and is visited by more than six million people a year -- as a world cultural heritage center,” it said.

The Louvre's current Islamic art wing is the youngest department in the museum, created only in 2003 with pieces spanning 13 centuries and three continents, showing the spread of Islamic civilization from Spain to India . 

The collection is especially strong in the areas of medieval Persian and Arab art and the Ottoman Empire .

It also has major archeological holdings and a well-preserved archive of papyrus documents from the first centuries of Islam.

Philanthropist Walid

Prince Walid is one of the richest individuals in the world, with a fortune estimated at $20 billion (16.6 billion euros).

He was recently ranked by Forbes Magazine as the fifth wealthiest individual in the world, and is a confirmed philanthropist who gives away about $100 million (83 million euros) each year.

Born in Riyadh in March 1955 of a Lebanese mother, Prince Walid was educated in an American business school before beginning to construct his worldwide financial empire of banks, luxury hotels, and media properties, much of it concentrated in the United States .

A canny investor, the Saudi prince invested heavily in 1991 in a severely ailing Citicorp, today one of the largest financial institutions on the globe.

His stake in the company rose as high as 14 percent in the early 1990s, and today stands at four percent of the renamed Citigroup.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Walid has sought, in his words, “both publicly and secretly” to improve relations between the West and the Arab countries.

While acknowledging certain “weaknesses in the Arab world,” he insists that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the root of tensions between the West and Arab countries.