They take their name from the hero of a 19th-century novel. They meet, once a month, in the oak-paneled Victorian rooms of the National Arts Club, at Gramercy Park, to discuss Oriental rugs and textiles. They are enthusiasts of scholarship, conservation, and collecting. They are the Hajji Baba Club.

Founded in 1932, the Hajji Baba Club is New York’s oldest and best-known carpet club, with roughly 140 current members. They are the sort of people who know the difference between, say, Turkmen and Persian weaving: collectors, scholars, and carpet aficionados with a taste for objects from the Near East and Central Asia. And while the Hajjis are largely unknown outside the world of Oriental carpet collecting, that may soon change.

Beginning April 11, the New-York Historical Society will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the club with an exhibition, “Woven Splendor From Timbuktu to Tibet: Exotic Rugs and Textiles from New York Collectors.” The show gathers more than 100 objects — Tajik bridal veils and tent strut covers from Kyrgyzstan, Ottoman silk, and Kurdish tapestries. The pieces come from the collections of Hajji Baba Club members, as well as objects once owned by Hajji that are now in museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Textile Museum in Washington. Curated by Jon Thompson, an Islamic textiles scholar at Oxford’s Ashmolean, “Woven Splendor” is the first comprehensive museum survey of Hajji collections since an exhibition at the Asia Society in 1982.

“We just didn’t want to have what you would call a ‘vanity exhibition’ where collectors get together and hang their pieces on the wall,” the president of the Hajji Baba Club, Kurt Munkacsi, said. For that reason, Mr. Thompson was asked to organize the exhibition — with the free hand of an outside authority. “Because the Hajjis do make this claim to being the oldest and most prestigious of the rug societies in the U.S., we decided we wanted have a prominent scholar curate the exhibition and write a publication around it. Not just a picture book, but an actual text,” Mr. Munkacsi said.

A self-described “Turkomaniac” who keeps his collection of Turkmen weavings in a climate-controlled, cedar-paneled room, Mr. Munkacsi, who is Philip Glass’s producer, has been collecting Islamic textiles since the early 1980s. Five are included in the exhibition, among them a magnificent wool-and-silk “bag face” (the decorated front of a bag) from what is now Turkmenistan.

A historian and Hajji Baba Club member, Thomas Farnham, who contributed a chapter on the history of the club to the “Woven Splendor” catalog, said that although the Hajjis were not themselves scholars, they helped introduce modern scholarship to the field. “The people who formed the club were committed to the concept of the carpets as art,” Mr. Farnham said, adding that members of the Hajji Baba Club were among the first to appreciate the rugs as part of a thousands-of-years-old artistic tradition, not merely as “exotic” decorations. “They were a bunch of autodidacts. They set to work studying very, very diligently how the carpets were made, how the carpets were used. They didn’t start with a lot of information but they taught themselves and got good at it,” Mr. Farnham said, adding that the softening of the rug market during the Depression allowed the Hajji to amass their collections relatively cheaply.

One founding member of the club, George Hewitt Myers, also founded the Textile Museum in Washington. Another, Joseph McMullan, would donate his extraordinary collection of Islamic carpets to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, forming a pillar of the museum’s holdings. The Bronx-born McMullan is one of the most distinctive Hajji. His interest in carpets was sparked by a trip to Gimbels Department Store, to buy a rug, and it never let up. A one-time pipe-layer, McMullan trained his eye during trips to the New York City Public Library and auction rooms of the American Art Association.

“He’s one of two collectors who really made the collection for us,” a curator of Islamic art at the Met, Stefano Carboni, said. Mr. Carboni added that one of McMullan’s gifts to the museum, a rare 16th-century Ottoman prayer rug, is one of the treasures of the collection. “The rarity. The knotting. The field is so well defined. The condition is so good. It’s recognized as one of the earliest of this type that is in any collection in the world, including Turkey.” The rug has been lent to the “Woven Splendor” exhibition.

Today, members of the Hajji are more likely to collect the tribal textiles of Central Asia than the “classical” carpets prized by McMullan’s generation. “Those carpets are hard to collect,” the curator of textiles and Islamic art at the Cleveland Museum, Louise Mackie, said. She cited their cost as a prohibitive factor, adding that today’s collectors are more interested in the utilitarian role of textiles.

That may be for the best. Although the taste of its members may have changed, the Hajji Baba Club is still distinguished by its intellectual curiosity. Now, as then, such curiosity is bound by neither region nor religion. “Anyone who spends time collecting in this area has to learn about the people who made them,” Ms. Mackie said. “So in this day and age where we learn about the Middle East because of conflict, these carpet collectors have always known about the region from the strength of its culture.”