The commemorative volume to mark the 10th anniversary of the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia is as dense and weighty as the museum is light and airy.

There is also an exhibition to mark the occasion. A Decade Of Dedication gives the kind of overview that Islamic art really needs. It’s a big subject, spanning 1,400 years and more than half the globe. How can anyone cram that much potential into one gallery?

At a museum like the Louvre, there are more than 10 kilometres of galleries to convey the art of the world, and an exhausting experience it is. The batteries will run out on your audio guide before you have got halfway through the maze of different wings.

The only consolation is that you won’t encounter many other visitors in an area such as 19th century French academic paintings because they are all queuing for a look at the Mona Lisa.

The challenge of representing a huge subject is handled differently at the IAMM’s 10th anniversary exhibition.

Instead of making you walk further, there is a condensing of artefacts. Fifty or so objects have been called upon to represent the collection. As the total number is close to 8,000, it’s a rigorous exercise in whittling down.

There is nothing superfluous in this display. Everything has to tell a story, and the stories are mostly about what selected objects do, rather than how they look or where they come from.

The concept behind the exhibition involves showing different categories of objects: what existed and how they were used. It’s a surprisingly unusual approach but it works well as a reminder that Islamic art tends to consist of the everyday, including wash basins and measuring implements.

One of the most illustrious Islamic artefacts in existence – housed in Leningrad’s State Hermitage Museum – is known as the Bobrinsky Bucket. It’s a description that lacks glamour in its brutal honesty.

There is much to be learnt about life as it used to be lived from looking at the things that people used. Very little of what’s on view at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia was intended to be seen on a wall, unless it was part of the wall itself.

There are, indeed, some of these items in the exhibition, making one wonder what happened to the walls that they were once part of.

Inevitably, buildings fall apart. When they do, it is possible to salvage bits of them and hope they will be appreciated and sympathetically displayed in a museum environment.

The alternative is a fate like that of Stonehenge: up until the early 20th century, stones were being removed by local farmers to improve the quality of their roads. I haven’t spotted anyone doing that to the replica of Stonehenge that exists near the IAMM in Lake Gardens. This structure is discreetly placed to avoid the attention of tomb robbers and road constructors. Instead it attracts 21st century offerings of KFC and McDonalds leftovers.

A great collection of Islamic art informs the viewer about the past, with details such as how food receptacles used to be more appealing than moulded polystyrene, and more eco-friendly too.

The past was a place of recyclers. Human lives might have been relatively disposable, but nothing else was. Just as the ancient Greek vases that are venerated today were once regarded as little better than milk bottles, many Islamic artefacts were far from being objets d’art in their time. That didn’t stop people loving them, and so they have survived.

A personal favourite of mine are the “albarello” jars used for centuries by apothecaries in the Islamic world. A pair of Spanish jars in the exhibition shows a combination of aesthetics and technological advancement that would have made these the property of a Beverly Hills apothecary of their day.

Image is everything in a business like medicine; the pharmacist of 500 years ago would have known how to impress with his albarellos in the same way that his modern counterpart does with a Philippe Starck reception suite.

A huge amount of material has been acquired in the past decade. It is just as well the IAMM had a headstart, since the newer institutions have been left scrabbling for objects whose prices have tripled in recent years.

There is more to the development of a museum than expanding its collection. There are also the parts that the public never gets to see, such as a conservation department that has gone from nothing to regional stardom in a mere six years.

Or there is a library that has developed at the same pace but is visited by rather more people. The education department is probably the most accessible part of the museum, and like the other facilities it has gone through a total transformation. All of these elements are visible at A Decade of Dedication.

It was not certain 10 years ago that an Islamic-art museum was going to be a winning formula for Malaysia. Despite this, the prime minister at the time needed little persuasion to share the vision.

A Decade Of Dedication at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia ends Aug 9, 2009.