10 - 16 May 2001
Issue No.533
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 10 - 16 May 2001 Issue No.533 |
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Bringing the city to life
The Living Stones of Cairo, Jaroslaw Dobrowolski, Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001. pp105
Jaroslaw Dobrowolski, we are informed through the blurb and introduction to this book, is a conservationist who has worked in Cairo since the 1980s and is currently technical director for the Egyptian Antiquities Project of the American Research Center in Egypt. As such, he is intimately familiar with many of the buildings of Islamic Cairo. He is also professionally well qualified to have produced a serious academic book on a wide range of subjects.
Instead, however, he has chosen to write here a guide of sorts for the educated layman interested in the spectacular remains of Cairo's mediaeval culture and civilisation, and one coming closer to personal notes on favourite buildings and sites than to a systematic survey of the city's main attractions. The chosen monuments are all Islamic, mostly mediaeval, and the notes are arranged as separate entries, so that one can either read the book from cover to cover or simply go straight to a particular monument.
The book is something of a cross between a standard travel guide giving basic -- if by definition somewhat superficial -- information on historical sites and a more comprehensive academic title intended as an introduction to the history and architecture of the city of Cairo. Nevertheless, it is not meant to replace either sort of book, and from here come both its attractions and its limitations. The blurb on the cover defines its target audience as being those "involved travellers who strive to make the encounter with another culture more meaningful and shift their perspective form the 'exotic' to the familiar." The book includes a map of historic Cairo with the mentioned sites marked, as well as a brief glossary of names and terms for the uninitiated.
Dobrowolski's notes -- unsystematic as they may be -- introduce the reader to the atmosphere of power, politics and, often, conspiracy that accompanied the building of the great structures of Cairo that stand till today. He introduces the reader to historical characters some of whom are only known in connection with the buildings they commissioned. Who, after all, was the Ilgay Al-Yusufi whose madrasa [school] still stands on Suq Al-Silah Street? Or the Shaykhu whose sabil [water fountain] stands abandoned but still very much there on Bab Al-Wazir Street and who also even founded a madrasa on Saliba Street? Or the Nafisa Al-Bayda whose sabil-kuttab on the Qasaba was recently renovated?
These notes bring such buildings to life. On Cairo's famous Bab Zuwayla gate, for example, the author writes that "the crowd here has never lacked for extraordinary events at which to marvel. Rulers passed in ceremonial processions, saluted from the gate by an orchestra; rebellious chiefs were paraded in chains; the precious cover of the holy shrine of the Ka'ba was dispatched this way to Mecca every year. The rich and the powerful embellished the area with sumptuous buildings, and between 1415 and 1420 Sultan al-Mu'ayyad Shaykh even built a pair of ornate minarets on the tops of the gate's two semicircular towers. Bab Zuwayla was an ill-famed place too, where executions were held." He also reminds the reader that such great buildings as the madrasas of Sultan Hasan and Sultan Barquq were "not meant to be lifeless memorials to their founders' glory; they were designed to be a functioning part of the living city, and they were busy with different activities" -- housing students and Sufis, as well as being centres of learning and prayer.
The author's considerable experience of conservation, as well as his opinions of recent restorations, also come out in his notes. Thus, for example, while describing the courtyard of Al-Azhar Mosque he writes that "a recent restoration left the external stone facades (mostly Ottoman and nineteenth century) shining clean, but also obliterated some original Fatimid decoration. This work is only the last in a long succession of rebuilding and additions that began just ten years after the first construction, leaving little of the original structure in place."
Dobrowolski also animates his notes with his own pen-and-ink sketches of these buildings. Drawn over a period of ten years, these seem to have been the impetus behind the book. In some ways they remind one of similar drawings by early modern Orientalist travellers before the spread of photography. Concentrating on the lines of the buildings, the perspectives given in such drawings are sharply different from those we have become accustomed to in modern photographs.
Most of the sketches are of buildings and stones, however; there is little sign of human life here. And while the notes themselves refer heavily to the people who built such stone edifices -- and not simply to their architectural qualifications -- one can't help but feel that they are somehow suspended in time, given the lack of human population and activity to animate them. Dobrowolski sometimes compensates for this when he attempts to connect past with present in his text, telling us, for example, about markets that have retained their names over centuries while changing their specialities. Suq Al-Silah now sells fruits and vegetables instead of swords and daggers, for example, while small boys still attend afternoon school at the mosque of Al-Salih Talai'.
However, it is still necessary, and strongly advisable, actually to see and experience at first hand the buildings Dobrowolski describes here in real time in order to bring back the people who live with and among these structures today. Perhaps it is this that will make this book an excellent companion on leisurely springtime walks around the city.
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary
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