It all started in June 2014 when the government announced an ambitious plan in multiple phases to improve the performance of the roads in Cairo, either by widening existing ones or by creating new highways, flyovers, and corridors.
The objective of this plan, according to the government, was to spare the capital from its reputation as a city of tough traffic in order to entice new investments. As the government statement indicated, the new roads would cut through some segments of the older quarters of the city, though it did not announce the specific details.
However, some timid voices spoke of the possibly harmful impact of this scheme on the urban fabric of a significant part of Cairo, namely the city’s cemeteries in the City of the Dead.
“We are talking about a part of the city that has layers and layers of history, parts of which date back over 10 centuries,” said one source who is a former member of a government body that examined the proposed plans at an early stage.
“I was accused of being an alarmist when I said during one of the public meetings that were held to discuss the plan that this was going to be damaging. But today we are helpless witnesses to the possible elimination of large chunks of the old cemeteries, some of which date back to the early years of Arab rule, making them older than Cairo as established by the Fatimids in the 10th century CE,” the source said.
According to the same source, the plan proposed in 2014 that has recently entered a crucial phase of implementation with the demolition of cemeteries in the Imam Shafei and Imam Leithi and Sayeda Nafisa and Sayeda Aisha areas was in fact a slightly upgraded version of a scheme originally proposed in 2008 as part of what was labelled “Cairo 2050”.
The source explained that this vision was promoted as a scheme to make Cairo a modern city. “Right from the start this was problematic. Cairo is an old city with old and modern quarters,” the source said, adding that the concept of “global, green and connected” city that was offered as the base for this vision “sounded nice but in reality it included some really problematic proposals, including what we are seeing now with the demolition of large segments of the oldest cemeteries in the city.”
According to a source at the Ministry of Housing, when the plan got picked up again and was sent to government bodies for revision, apprehensions were voiced at many levels. Part of these related to the historic value of this part of the city. Another part related to the fact that this is included in the UN cultural agency UNESCO’s list of heritage sites in Egypt.
However, the apprehensions of conservators were firmly silenced in favour of what was promised as the overdue modernisation of a city that is over-crowded and has chronic traffic problems said to be intimidating to visitors and investors alike. Allocations were made for the construction of new traffic corridors across Greater Cairo, with the eastern part of the city being the main venue, especially with the parallel construction of the New Administrative Capital between Cairo and Ain Sokhna.
The construction of flyovers in Heliopolis and Nasr City in the east of Cairo at the expense of cutting down a large number of trees, some of which were close to 100 years old, and the ripping up of the tram lines that for close to a century had carried passengers in and out of Heliopolis were done as necessary for modernisation to the dismay of residents of these neighbourhoods. They saw radical changes in the urban fabric of this part of Cairo that was built in the early decades of the 20th century, with Nasr City having initially been constructed as an administrative quarter of the capital.
“It was totally damaging, what happened in the east of Cairo, and not just in Heliopolis. Several neighbourhoods have lost their identity for good as they have all turned into being an extended series of districts overshadowed with flyovers,” said Michel Hannah, who has been documenting the architecture of the city for two consecutive decades.
He said that the “damage” that hit eastern Cairo in order to resolve the traffic congestion could be compared to the “devastating demolitions” that have been hitting the old cemeteries of Cairo under the banner of modernisation.
A CORRIDOR TO HEAVEN? The debate over the relaunched Cairo 2050 scheme continued at low volume until the summer of 2020, when the government started to remove segments of the cemeteries of Al-Ghafeer to construct the Mehwar Al-Fardos (Heaven Corridor), a nine-km highway, with flyovers, that connects the east of Cairo to New Cairo on the way to the new capital.
Ahead of the demolitions, Galila Al-Kadi, a professor of architecture and a leading conservation architect, tried to garner public support against a demolition campaign that she argued was “violating the history of the city, its visual identity, and its urban fabric”. But she failed to reverse the demolitions that “forever removed some unique items of contemporary funerary architecture”.
In response, government officials stressed that no registered monuments were demolished. They added that it was impossible to leave the notorious traffic jams of Cairo unresolved. The demolitions executed in 2020, they argued, had also not been unprecedented given that previous demolitions had occurred since the late 19th century to allow for the construction of new roads. The city has to modernise, they said in statements.
But the author of Architecture for the Dead: Cairo’s Medieval Necropolis, Al-Kadi argued that it made no sense to compromise what amounts to 14 centuries of history, “irrespective of what is registered and what is not”, in order to create traffic corridors that cut through the city.
Nairy Hampikian, an architect who had renovated many of Cairo’s monuments and architectural gems, argued that what might have been unavoidable over a century ago or even 50 years ago could have at least been partially avoidable now with new techniques that could have allowed for the dismantling and reassembling of at least some of the buildings concerned.
At the very least, Hampikian said, there should have been a proper survey to allow government and concerned historians and conservationists to know “what is really there [irrespective of] what is registered and what is not, because this is history… and because we are talking about a space that holds so many types of architecture, including Neo-Pharaonic and Neo-Islamic.”
May Al-Ibrashi, an architect whose work encourages civil society-led preservation and conservation, lamented the failure of the campaign to stop the many changes that she said were coming at a very heavy price to serve a purpose that could have been addressed outside the mediaeval city. “This is the second decade of the 21st century; cities with traffic issues do not knock down historic parts but opt for public transport solutions instead,” she said.
The fact that the 2020 demolitions encroached on the tombs of leading 20th-century political and cultural figures and the personal tombs of citizens who were shattered by the removal of the remains of loved ones gave a strong momentum to the considerable public furore. However, this had no impact on the scheme. The demolitions were all done in the “public interest”, the government insisted.
In 2022, the tomb of prominent literary figure Taha Hussein narrowly escaped demolition after an uproar initiated by a statement from the family expressing their shock over plans for demolition to allow for the construction of yet more flyovers in the Yasser Rizk Corridor.
“The cemetery was spared, but it is now there with a peculiar flyover hanging over it; it is just unbelievable,” said Mustafa Al-Sadek, a connoisseur of history who has been walking the roads of the city and taking pictures of its monuments, cemeteries included, for close to three decades. The tombs of many cultural, political, and military figures have gone, especially over recent weeks, he said.
“Our history is there, with these monuments that tell the real stories that are often either inaccurate or incomplete in the authorised versions promoted in the school curricula or the media,” Al-Sadek said. “It is not just political history, but also social history and the history of art.”
The shock and dismay that Al-Sadek felt with the demolitions of 2020 and those of 2022 is nowhere near the devastation that hit him during recent weeks with the new demolitions, however. “These are much more aggressive and much more damaging, both in terms of scope and value,” he said.
Just this week, Al-Sadek in the company of a group of keen history enthusiasts came across a tombstone that dates to 1,200 years ago. They managed to spare it from the clutches of the bulldozers and to transfer it to the concerned authority in the hope of having it displayed in the Museum of Islamic Art.
“We know what we miraculously saved, but we don’t know what we did not save,” he said. “It is so troubling to think that the Rosetta Stone itself was just part of a wall. If that had been knocked down unexcavated, what would have happened regarding the decipherment of hieroglyphics,” he asked.
Al-Sadek insists that the worry is strictly apolitical. “Nobody is deliberately picking a fight over government plans, and nobody wants this to turn into a political issue; this is strictly a matter of history and of the need to find a way to avoid having history compromised under the name of modernisation,” he said.
An architect and expert on planning, Amr Essam argues that the experience of the Heaven Corridor shows that the expansion of roads does not resolve traffic issues but rather the opposite, as it “drags the city into the induced demand effect” whereby more roads does not mean less traffic but rather more vehicles.
“Cairo is undeniably a big city with big traffic issues, but this is not exactly a function of a shortage of roads but rather a function of inefficient traffic management and inefficient public transport,” Essam said.
“Statistically speaking, only 13 per cent of Cairo households have private cars, while unofficial public transport, which is mostly highly polluting and hazardous minibuses, count for over 60 per cent of overall public transport,” he said. This is a result of the 1967 defeat that compromised public spending on infrastructure in favour of perfectly legitimate military spending and of the Open Door policy adopted after the 1973 October Crossing whereby the government stopped providing public services without allowing for efficient private-sector replacements.
At a time of major economic challenges, cheaper microbuses have become the transport of choice for many over the metro, “which is still falling short of covering the required segments of the city and whose fares have become quite costly for more and more people over the past few years.”
The call of the “public interest”, Essam argued, could be legitimate, but it is equally legitimate to work on serving it without compromising the history of the city that is also part of the public interest.
“There are many alternative solutions including introducing an unobtrusive public transport network, like the super tram, or building tunnels. These are options that would not have caused any of the shocking damage we have seen to the historic cemeteries,” he said.
“There are options that might have required more time or more funding, but it would have certainly been worthwhile because creating a balance between conservation and modernisation deserves time and money.”
DE-HISTORICISATION: According to Marwa Abdel-Gawad, a PhD student in the history of architecture, “erasing parts of the layered story of Cairo” is not just troubling from the point of view of conservation, but it could also challenge the inclusion of the old parts of the city in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
“About a year ago, UNESCO removed the Liverpool commercial harbour from its List because it found that the development projects there undermined a big part of its historic nature,” she said. However, what is being lost today in Cairo is a lot more precious in many ways. “For example, the tombstones were among the few remaining sources to document the evolution of Arabic calligraphy as it has been practiced in Egypt for 14 centuries,” she stated.
Calligrapher Mahmoud Atef has spent long hours tracing the marvels of Arabic calligraphy on the tombstones of Cairo’s City of the Dead. But today, he said that priceless pieces and an unexcavated wealth of knowledge are disappearing.
“So many diverse types of calligraphy and the living record of centuries of the evolution of calligraphy, and the cultural and social norms behind it, are being lost,” he lamented. This, he said, was shocking in a country with a long history of calligraphy, even “prior to the Mameluke years and the time of the khedive Ismail and the Royal School of Arabic Calligraphy that was established under king Fouad in 1922.”
Over 10 years ago, Mohamed Shafei graduated from this school to add academic knowledge to a profession that has been running in his family for decades, with a grandfather and great grandfather who contributed to the calligraphy on the tombstones of successive generations of top politicians and prominent characters. His long strolls in the spacious areas of the old cemeteries of Cairo have often put him face to face, not just with his family legacy, but also with the legacy of Arabic calligraphy in Egypt.
“With limited resources on the history of Arabic calligraphy, the cemeteries constituted a wealth of knowledge,” he said.
Shafei has invested the last five years to studying the calligraphy engraved on the tombstones of the old cemeteries during the 19th and 20th centuries. The findings of this study supported by the Institut français d’archéologie orientale will be published this year along with a set of photographs that Shafei is grateful he managed to capture before so much was demolished. “I was hoping to do a lot more, but so much is gone,” he said.
Today, as the bulldozers continue to erase segments of the city, Shafei is among the passionate enthusiasts who are “racing against time” to capture whatever they can.
Hossam Abdel-Azim, founder of Witnesses of Egypt, which started as a volunteer conservation scheme to clean historic sites before it turned into a documentation mission, also said that he is racing against time not just to document this history but also to rescue some significant pieces before or right after demolition.
Just this week, Abdel-Azim and his team managed to reassemble a fractured tombstone and to give the pieces to the competent authority for restoration and eventual display. “We are trying to move ahead of the demolition teams to rescue and document, but ultimately we are a small group of volunteers and we are not able to cover everything that is there,” he said. Eventually, he added, the documentation will be made available in the public domain in many formats.
According to Hannah, it is devastating that all the documentation that has been done has been voluntary. One day, some institution should allow all the photographs and videos that have been gathered by different groups and individuals to come together in memory of the city.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 June, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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