Maan Z Madina (1926–2013)

He grew up in the Kurdish quarter of Damascus, and did his undergraduate studies at the American University in Beirut. He arrived in the United States in 1947 to do graduate work in political science at the University of Chicago and moved to New York in 1958 to teach at Columbia.

He began collecting art while at Columbia, and assembled one of the finest and most comprehensive private collections of Islamic art objects in the 20th century. The Madina Collection of 800 Islamic art objects was acquired in 2002 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.