Dec 13
Sharjah, is one of the seven emirates that form the United Arab Emirates. Until today, I had not even heard of Sharjah; or if I had, I had forgotten. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are much more well-known in the western world. The latter being particularly well-known by readers of Garfield as that was the desination of choice of where Garfield was always mailing Nermal.
I wasn't suprised, however, to see a U.S. president on a non-U.S. coin. In fact there's a good number of countries that mint commemorative coins with U.S. presidents on them. Liberia has a number of them. Sharjah also does not limit itself to commemorativing notable U.S. presidents. They have also minted coins with Simon Bolivar, Napoleon Bonaparte and there are even coins with the Mona Lisa depicted on them.
After some further research it turns out this John F. Kennedy Memorial coin was not sanctioned by the British and was made at the request of Sheikh Saqr III of Sharjah. If you tried to look it up in a Krause catalog, you would need to refer to their catalog of unusual world coins as opposed to the standard catalog.
The coin is 72% silver and has just about .58 ounces of silver. Checking eBay's completed listings I see coins in nice shape selling between $30 and $65 each. It also looks like Aspencoins is selling one of these coins as well: bidding ends in 5 days as of published time
