The Sharjah Calligraphy Museum occupies a restored Heritage Area building and presents one of the better collections of Arabic calligraphy outside the great museums of Cairo and Istanbul. The museum covers the major calligraphic styles that developed across the Islamic world and displays manuscripts, Quranic texts, and contemporary calligraphic art in a space that treats the writing of Arabic as the high art form it has been for fourteen centuries.
For visitors unfamiliar with the tradition, the museum is a good introduction to understanding why calligraphy occupies the place in Islamic culture that figurative painting occupies in the Western tradition. The scripts are genuinely beautiful, and seeing them presented seriously rather than as tourist decoration changes how you read the Arabic text visible on every building in the Gulf.