In the third week of June 972 CE, exactly 1,050 years ago, Al-Muizz li-Din Allah arrived in Egypt from North Africa to become the first ruler of Egypt’s Fatimid Dynasty and the first to govern the country from the city he built to outdo all those of the country’s previous rulers.
This city, Al-Qahera, or Cairo, has been named this year’s Capital of Culture of the Islamic World by the Islamic World Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (ICESCO), an agency of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) concerned with education, science, culture, and communication in the Islamic countries.
Cairo’s appointment was originally scheduled for 2020 but was put off due to the Covid-19 pandemic. To mark the occasion, the Ministry of Culture has been holding a series of events including seminars and art performances and the screening of documentaries that reflect on Cairo’s Islamic heritage.
After the Arab-Muslim takeover of Egypt in 640 CE, the new rulers of the country had built three consecutive capitals prior to Al-Qahera, namely Al-Fustat, Al-Askar, and Al-Qataa. Some historians would argue that the new Fatimid capital of Al-Qahera, originally a walled city containing two palaces and a mosque, inevitably absorbed all the previous capitals of Egypt’s Arab Muslim rulers, creating what was to become the conurbation of Cairo.
Throughout the subsequent decades of Muslim rule, however, Cairo was never the capital of the Islamic caliphate. But it was always a city enjoying a significant presence in Islamic civilisation. For Nezar Al-Sayyad, a professor of architecture and urban history at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US, this year’s naming of Cairo as the ICESCO Capital of the Culture of the Islamic World is an opportunity for hard work to make sure that the city’s place in Islamic culture is appropriately remembered.
Author, co-author, or editor of some 20 titles on the history of Cairo, Al-Sayyad said in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly that Cairo’s naming this year should honour the heritage of this almost 11-century-old city and its links with Islamic civilisation. It was an opportunity to revisit many ideas about the concept of an “Islamic city”, something which he said related more to the urban norms of the time rather than to any dominant religion or the elements of Islamic civilisation.
“There is no single definition of Islamic civilisation, just as there is no single definition of any other civilisation, because inevitably a civilisation is the product of a set of ideas and norms that controls people’s lives,” Al-Sayyad said. The case of Islamic civilisation was particularly interesting because it saw the metamorphosis of Islam from a religion to a whole set of cultural norms reflected in all aspects of life, including the architecture of Egypt’s Mamluk period, considered by many historians to be the gems of Cairo’s association with Islamic civilisation.
This was so “given that the peak of urban development is often also a moment of cultural prominence,” Al-Sayyad added.
But the high points of the development of Cairo cannot exclude the work done under the khedive Ismail in the 19th century either, Al-Sayyad said, since this “took the city from being one from the Middle Ages to modern times.” In fact, it was the pursuit of modernity, he added, that had given the city its most important urban moments from its foundation under the Fatimids to the rule of the Free Officers after the 1952 Revolution. What was built under the khedive Ismail could also not be seen in terms of an “Islamic city”, he added.
Today, Al-Sayyad said, many of monuments from the periods of Cairo’s architectural flourishing are being compromised, whether those built under the rulers of the Middle Ages or under the later Mohamed Ali Dynasty from the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries.
“Cairo has been made this year’s Capital of Islamic Culture, while at the same time some of the gems of Islamic architecture in the city are being compromised or destroyed, both in the vicinity of the historic cemeteries or even in the heart of what was once the Fatimid gated city,” he said.
Over the past decade, and especially during the past three to four years, some irreparable harm had been done, he added.
DAMAGE
The damage was not only about the destruction or the falling into disrepair of some buildings, Al-Sayyad said. There was also the building of new constructions in the historic zones.
“Why should we tolerate the construction of a parking lot in the heart of Fatimid Cairo? Why should cars be allowed into this zone to start with? When we talk about the original plan of Fatimid Cairo, we are actually talking about a single square km,” he said, adding that this could at least be saved from cars.
While it was a good idea to mark Cairo’s year as Capital of Islamic Culture through art and other performances, it would be an equally good idea to look again at the changes taking place in the historic areas of the city, either by addition or destruction.
Al-Sayyad acknowledged that Cairo was not new to losing historic areas and buildings. It had happened many times before, starting especially with the modernisation schemes of the rulers of the Mohamed Ali family, among them the khedive Ismail. However, he said that what should be done before any changes are introduced is to carry out a careful process of documentation, something that is easier to execute today than it once was.
Equally, he said, maintaining historic buildings or even having them moved and reassembled is much easier today than before. In the early 20th century, some historic buildings were moved and reassembled to make way for new developments, he said, and this could happen again today.
As part of this year’s celebrations, plans need to be made and implemented to help preserve historic Cairo, especially its original quarters. There is no shortage of examples taken from other cities worldwide that could be used as references in the elaboration of such a scheme.
But, as Al-Sayyad said, the history of Cairo’s development has never been smooth. This original capital of the Fatimids was built above and in part upon three consecutive capitals that were never fully designed as cities but were more like temporary administrative bases. After the fall of the Fatimids and the end of the gated city under subsequent Ayoubid Dynasty rule, Cairo underwent unplanned development that then had to be addressed under subsequent Mamluk rule.
The uneven roads challenged Mamluk architects as they built the architectural gems of the time. “Some of the empty lots the architects had to work with were very complicated to handle, and this became exactly the core of the brilliance of Mamluk architecture, not just in the buildings but also in the plans as well,” Al-Sayyad said. It was also part of the unique design of Cairo as a city with a layered urban plan.
This year’s celebration of Cairo should be an opportunity to recapture some of the aspects of the city in the Middle Ages, he said. “With the exception of the Fatimid mosques, the mosques of the city for the better part of its history were never exclusively prayer spaces, for example. Instead, they were more like educational institutions, and the concept of the mosque-school dominated,” he added.
In the case of the mosque-school of Al-Saleh Najmuddin Al-Ayoubi, there were areas to teach all four schools of Islamic Law. Other elements of Islamic culture were reflected in the architecture of the city, he said, including the kuttab-sabil complexes, buildings made up of elementary schools and water fountains, which were a dominant feature of Cairo architecture during Mamluk rule. “This was far more the case in Cairo than in other cities under Muslim rulers during the Middle Ages,” he said.
The modernisation of Cairo that Mohamed Ali began in the early 19th century did not disconnect the city from architectural expressions of Islamic culture. “There is an organic development to culture,” Al-Sayyad said, which was reflected in the city even with the significant shifts that came in building design and urban planning.
The expansion of Cairo that took place in the second half of the 19th century under the khedive Ismail certainly took place using the architectural parameters of the time. This could have amounted to “a rupture”, especially since the architects involved were mostly European, even if they worked with Egyptian construction workers and masons.
It was at this point that the historic part of the city, the city of the Middle Ages built under the Islamic rulers, started to be left behind. “But it is important to remember that some architectural elements persisted, as one can see in the building of the Islamic Museum in the late 19th century and the Al-Rifaai Mosque,” Al-Sayyad noted, both of which use a Neo- Mamluk style of architecture, making this for a time the Egyptian national style.
This style later inspired many examples of 20th-century architecture, Al-Sayyad added, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. But this continuity is in itself powerful testimony to the glory of this architectural style that gave historic Cairo some of its most precious buildings.
A version of this article appears in print in the 30 June, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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