By Mandi Gomez, London – United Kingdom

The recently launched Museum With No Frontiers (MWNF) Travel portal offers a travel experience like no other for groups of seven or more people, delivers unique insight into various areas of cultural interest, and exemplifies responsible travel. Each of the tours offered in the 2009–10 programme focuses on a specific theme of Islamic Art in the Mediterranean within North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe, and features a selection of art and architecture seldom seen on the tourist trail and not commonly presented in most travel guides or tour programmes.

The relevant thematic guide is available in print or as an e-book for travellers to peruse beforehand. They are based on the MWNF Exhibition Trail format where instead of moving the works of art, it is the visitor who moves around to discover monuments, archaeological sites and artefacts at museums within their natural environment. Researched and written by local scholars, Islamic history is told from the local perspective, an ethos upheld by the MWNF Travel platform.

All MWNF tour guides are qualified to at least degree level in the subject of the tour and are expert in the local history of the area. Unusually, MWNF publishes the names of its local partner travel agents, taking a small commission from all tours sold. This income is reinvested to manage and sustain the world’s largest online Museum (www.discoverislamicart.org), which in itself is an extraordinary free resource for academics, students and the intelligent reader alike.

MWNF demonstrates a dedication to inclusive, responsible travel in other ways too. It has devised and overseen various conservation initiatives in the countries concerned, and augmented and supplied signage to provide information about various monuments and sites. In doing this, it has given back visibility and significance to many of them and successfully secured funding and attracted publicity to support further conservation projects.

Importantly, therefore, MWNF has been successful in invigorating a forgotten or at least a depleted cultural pride in some areas. MWNF promotes local heritage: monuments and archaeological sites, museums and their collections, juxtaposing the very well known among them with the less prominent. By presenting cultural heritage in this way, MWNF allows unique insight into the subject of Islamic Art.

MWNF will inspire you whichever doorway you choose to enter it from: whether it’s through reading one of the thematic guides, via the Virtual Museum or in person on a MWNF Travel tour.

By Eva Schubert

This is a very particular moment in the history of MWNF.

The MWNF website receives visits from all over the world – on average 1000 people per day come to our Virtual Museum, use our database or look at our tours – but until now we have had no opportunity for direct communication with our visitors except through the Feedback facility. From now on, this will change.

We have created two Blogs and opened an institutional MWNF page on Facebook.

In the MWNF Blog you will find guest articles about the MWNF programme. Furthermore, I will use the Blog to share with our visitors the history of MWNF from its beginning in 1993 – when I first made contact with the Ministries of Culture and Ministries of Tourism all around the Mediterranean and simultaneously implemented the MWNF pilot project in the Austrian region of Tyrol – up until today. There are a lot of very nice stories, anecdotes and experiences that take you “back stage” of MWNF giving insight into the organisation, although for obvious reasons some names and locations have been changed to ensure privacy. I believe that those moments, the genesis of the project, should not remain only with those of us who had the privilege to live it, but that we should all be the treasurers of the experience that I define as “a dream that became reality”.

With this statement I do not mean to imply that the most difficult times are behind us, on the contrary, the real difficulties are in front of us: we are aware that the reality of achieving sustainability for MWNF – a multilateral but totally independent organisation – is a huge challenge. But we are confident for the future thanks in many ways to the encouragement we receive daily from our visitors worldwide. Before embarking on the history of MWNF, however, I will first of all explain why we decided to make the history, culture and art of the Islamic Mediterranean the flagship topic of the MWNF programme.

Our second Blog is dedicated to the MWNF Travellers, those who have participated in one or more of the tours organised in association with our local partner travel agents. The MWNF Travellers’ Blog will also host articles written by guest authors about specific topics.

Finally, I would like briefly to explain the language policy of our Blogs: in order to ensure consistency and allow us to administer the two Blogs with available resources, we have decided that Guests’ and Eva’s Articles will be published in English only. Travellers’ Articles and Replies may, however, be posted in any of our navigation languages (Arabic, English, French or Spanish) as well as in German, Italian, Portuguese and Turkish.

We hope you will continue to visit us regularly and we look forward to hearing from you soon.