11 - 17 October 2001
Issue No.555
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 October 2001 Issue No.555 |
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A nuanced cartography
Cairo: City of History; André Raymond, transl. Willard Wood, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001. pp 436
There is, understandably, a Malthusian undertow to André Raymond's Cairo: City of History, a book that first appeared in 1993 and which is now published in an English translation by the American University in Cairo Press. It ends on an unmistakably apocalyptic note: "In the past," concludes Raymond, "demographic growth has been an asset to Egypt, giving it power, prestige and authority. Today it is a mortal danger. Cairo long played the part of safety valve for Egypt's population growth. Tomorrow it could be Egypt's detonator."
Such are the reversals of history. For the greater part of this study of the city's development Cairo's fortunes waxed and waned with its population: each, inexorably, indexed the other, a relationship that remained intact for the best part of a millennia. Thus, in times of crisis, it was emptiness that chroniclers would lament, desertification -- the city as a blasted place, a deserted landscape -- becoming the common analogy for failing fortunes.
"Cairo became an empty desert, and there was no one to be seen in the streets. A man could go from the Zuwayla Gate to the Bab al-Nasr without encountering another soul."
The quotation is from one of Raymond's star witnesses, Tageddin Ahmad Al-Maqrizi (1364-1442), evoking -- after the event -- the devastation brought to the city by the great plague of 1348 and initiating, Raymond contends, almost a century of urban degeneration. Not that it was all bad, despite such a massive hemorrhaging of the population. The author estimates the death toll in the city during the first outbreak of plague to have been equivalent to one third of the total population, a significant undercutting of the 900,000 casualties suggested by Maqrizi. Yet just six years later Sultan Hassan, "a relatively obscure ruler, controlled by officers who deposed him in 1351... and restored him to rule in 1354" began construction of the monumental mosque that bears his name, at a cost (no equivocation here about Maqrizi's estimate) of 20,000 dirhams a day, eventually adding, after three years, to 20 million. It is in the copious provision of such details that one of the strengths of this volume lies.
A more than 1,300 year time frame (from 642-1993) is bound to lead to unevenness, and it is not until the institution of the Mamluk system that this study really comes into its own. Almost half of the period covered by Raymond -- from the founding of Fustat in 642 to the accession of the first Mamluk sultan in 1250, is confined to 112 pages. Indeed, Raymond argues, it is only by the mid-13th century that "all the elements that were to constitute Cairo were finally in place."
The rather cursory run through of the first six centuries is used, therefore, mainly to underline trends to which Raymond will return in subsequent chapters, plotting the gradual shift of the urban centre north between 642 and 969, as the city crept closer to the Nile Delta, a movement that would culminate in the "twentieth century expansion onto the agricultural land of Qaliyubiyya province."
Mu'izzli-Din Allah Street and, above, interior of the mosque of Sinan Pasha (1571). Below, two palaces, from the Description de l'Egypte photos: Randa Shaath
"The supposed changelessness of Cairo from the high point of Islamo-Arabic civilisation to the nineteenth century, when the Arab city was transformed into one strongly marked by Western influence, is an illusion," suggests Raymond, in anticipation of his reconstruction of the Mamluk city, a reconstruction effected not only by a close scrutiny of its few surviving vestiges but -- significantly -- "through the collation of data from the Description de l'Egypte" and, as already noted, the writings of Maqrizi and a host of others.
Discussion of whatever vestiges have survived within the built environment, it should be noted, is restricted largely to their impact on the overall patterning of urbanisation. The author refrains, and with a generally commendable consistency, from positing any judgments on the architectural merits or otherwise of individual structures. His intention, after all, is not art historical. Even the most distinctive Mamluk structures, therefore, are described exclusively within the overriding framework of urbanism, and its concomitant administrative and social-economic dimensions. And when a judgment is essayed on the architecture itself, Raymond's strategy is, typically, to allow others to do the talking. His treatment of the Mosque of Mohamed Ali, a structure obviously not to his liking is, in this respect, exemplary: "Little can decently be said of a monument whose elements and details are heavy or in bad taste but whose silhouette has become as inalienable a feature of Cairo's skyline as the Eiffel tower of Paris'. At the beginning of the century, Arthur Rhoné, a great connoisseur and lover of Cairo, wrote very discerningly on this subject: 'From afar, [the mosque] produces a considerable effect by virtue of its mass, its large domes, its slender minarets rising like ships' masts. As one approaches, the effect changes, and one is affected painfully by this enormous Turkishism, so heavy, and so null after the lovely creations of early Arab architecture.'"
Such digressions, though, are rare, and if this is occasionally felt as an absence by the general reader the compensations offered in terms of a structuralist reading of individual buildings are considerable, and nowhere more so than in the author's discussion of the Ottoman city.
Central to Raymond's thesis is that the history of the modern city begins in 1517 -- a contention that is by no means undermined by the stress he places on the continuities that existed between Mamluk and early Ottoman administration in Egypt. "[Ottoman rule] has long been spoken of as a foreign rule, tyrannical and obscurantist, responsible for the decline of Egypt and Cairo." But, he writes, in introducing what constitutes the most exhaustive investigation included in the current volume, "we will have occasion to nuance that picture somewhat here."
A remarkable understatement, this "nuanc[ing] of the picture somewhat", since the intention is no less than to illustrate that "Ottoman Cairo represented the pinnacle of an 800-year history -- the realisation of an urban program launched in 969."
If "the Ottoman city borrowed much from the Mamluk period it was inarguably an original entity": Raymond aims, then, to furnish a detailed topography of that entity, mapping its political systems, the daily life of its inhabitants, the role of its communities, the exercise of law and order, marshaling an impressive array of sources to this end. Contemporary travellers accounts are ransacked to provide descriptions of the emerging suburbs, among the exhaustive roll call Pockocke on Giza and Imbaba; Leo Africanus, via Savary, on Boulak; Jean Coppin on the decline of Old Cairo, Gabriel Brémond on the "sumptuous palace" that was mid seventeenth century Khan Al-Khalili. Pascal Coste's early 19th century illustrations of Cairo, together with the Description de l'Egypte, provide the outline for several reconstructions of domestic and other buildings that would soon be destroyed in the radical spatial reorganisations that occurred after 1805, following the accession of Muhammad Ali. The Description de l'Egypte, in addition, provides the blueprint for the maps of Cairo in the Ottoman period included in the volume.
Until relatively recently the view that "Cairo returned [under the Ottomans] to dispersed patterns of settlement... The growing disorder of the city plan and the difficulty of communications... reflect[ing] the political and economic anarchy of the times" was a commonplace. (The quotation, from Marcel Clerget's Le Caire: Etude de géographie urbaine et d'histoire économique, 1934, is included in the present volume.) That one-time commonplace is here comprehensively debunked by Raymond, whose reading of primary sources, including wills, commercial contracts, and other legal material, uncovers "a period of genuine growth."
"The most beautiful houses in Cairo are situated around this birka. It is flooded for eight months of the year, and it is a perpetual garden during the other four. During the flood, one sees a great number of gilded brigantines on which persons of consequence and their wives take the air at night. There is not a day when fireworks are not set off and music not heard... It is one of the most beautiful spectacles the night has to offer." Description of Birkat Al-Fil, c. 1700, by a foreign resident of Cairo. Between 1650 and 1755, writes Raymond, three-quarters of all amirs' residences were in the southern section of Cairo, and 40 per cent of these were on the Birkat Al-Fil
The physical expansion of the city in the 17th century, fuelled by an economic boom, is carefully plotted, as are the mechanisms by which public services were generally provided, while documents from the religious court (Mahkama) provide a reasonably detailed picture of the structure of Ottoman Cairo.
Less satisfying, perhaps, is the treatment of the reorganisations the city would undergo, beginning in the 19th century and of which today's city is the result. Foregrounded in the final chapter of Cairo: City of History -- "A Slow Awakening"; "The Dream of Westernisation"; "The Nightmares of Growth"; the titles Raymond chooses to subdivide the final section of his study provide a functional précis not just of content but of the slant adopted towards the emerging city. And it is one that cannot, despite the fastidiously scholarly tone of the study, quite hide the nostalgia felt for the demise of the traditional city, that "pinnacle of an 800-year history" that reached its apogee a century and a half before the French Expedition. It is strange, perhaps, that there should be occasional hints of the elegiac permeating a work such as this, but hints there are, though as is the case with the author's response to the Mosque of Mohamed Ali, the expression of enthusiasms, too, tends towards the second hand. Thus, even that notorious fabulator, Savary, can be given the benefit of the doubt -- his "usual overenthusiasm" being "no doubt justified [by]... all this activity and dynamism."
Strange, maybe, such a convoluted suspension of disbelief, but oddly touching. And few readers with even a passing interest in the morphology of the city are likely to remain for long immune to Raymond's own scholarly enthusiasms.
Reviewed by Nigel Ryan
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