31 Jan. - 6 Feb. 2002
Issue No.571
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 31 Jan. - 6 Feb. 2002 Issue No.571 |
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Who owns the past?
Pascale Ghazaleh realises that restoration is about much more than the monuments
The problem with international treaties is that, when they conflict with other considerations, they tend to be ditched quite quickly, for reasons of expediency sometimes cloaked in sonorous justifications ("national sovereignty" usually does the trick). This is true not only of explicitly political matters, but also of fields that would otherwise appear relatively uncontroversial, like conservation of a country's architectural heritage.
Leaving well enough alone: Ibn Tulun's central courtyard photo: Christian Langtvet
The ambitious Historic Cairo Restoration Programme aims to restore 157 monuments within an eight-year schedule. The clock started ticking in 1998, and the government is moving fast. According to an internal report obtained by Al-Ahram Weekly, and prepared for UNESCO by a monitoring mission that visited Cairo last August, "the determination and momentum of the operation" are "impressive." The report cautions, however, that "this rapid undertaking also creates the imminent risk of making mistakes in a very delicate balance between the current needs of a fast-growing urban community and respect for authenticity and unique heritage values."
Potential conflict between the inhabitants of historical areas and the government's plans for those sites is one aspect of the great restoration debate; another is the definition of what, precisely, constitutes restoration, and who has the right to decide what must be restored and how.
Last year, a group of international scholars and heritage specialists drew up a letter of appeal in which they argued that many of Cairo's Islamic monuments were being renovated, not restored (the distinction residing in the exacting methods and holistic approach restoration requires, and which they judged sadly lacking in work on several important monuments). An uproar ensued, in which the terms of the debate moved in an unforeseen direction. Hosted principally by the literary magazine Akhbar Al-Adab, the discussion focused not so much on expertise and competing definitions of authenticity as on whether or not "foreigners" had the right to "interfere" in a matter judged to fall under the sole jurisdiction of Egypt -- i.e., of the government, and more specifically the Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for the project to rehabilitate Historic Cairo.
In early January, the Saudi Arabian government used similar logic to justify the demolition of an Ottoman fortress in Mecca. The French news agency AFP quoted Saudi Islamic Affairs Minister Saleh Al-Sheikh as saying that Saudi Arabia was "exercising its sovereignty... No one," he added, "has the right to interfere in what comes under the state's authority." Using the flip side of the same argument, Turkish Culture Minister Istemihan Talay described the Saudi decision as a "crime against humanity" and "cultural massacre." In place of the 18th-century Al-Ajyad fortress, the Saudi government announced it was planning to build a $533 million complex to house pilgrims visiting Mecca, and stated that "a reconstruction of the fort [will] be included as part of the site redevelopment."
That this misses the point of preservation entirely is an important part of the problem. What makes a monument valuable? For governments, profitability can be the crucial consideration. In comparison, the points that concern conservationists -- the patina of age, or the way the inhabitants of an historical area interact with their surroundings -- are not always relevant. In the case of Islamic Cairo, this means that the authorities want to attract tourism, above all, and therefore are eager to create "open-air museums" wherever possible. At the Aqueduct, for instance, restoration work will entail the removal of 3,000 inhabitants, and the demolition of 500 dwellings and 61 workshops. The report prepared for UNESCO warns that this decision "needs revision before irreversible changes of the environment take place."
A similar aesthetic has guided work elsewhere; at Sarghatmish Mosque, according to the report, "overnight cleaning of the façade with sand abrasive under high pressure has destroyed delicate detailing in the stone masonry... New marble panelling is being applied in the interior of the courtyard [although] no elements remain of the original dado." At the first four-iwan madrasa built in Egypt, that of Gamaleddin El-Ustadar, the report makes an analogous evaluation: "The installation [in the water basin] of built-in light fixtures according to the whims of an electrical engineer is out of place and not acceptable." The water basin, the report concludes tersely, "now resembles a modern jacuzzi."
By resorting to major contracting firms that can get the job done quickly, the authorities are ensuring the renovation of Cairo's Islamic monuments on a large scale. In the absence of appropriate technical expertise, however, as Saleh Lam'i, director of the Centre for Conservation and Preservation of the Islamic Architectural Heritage and member of the executive committee of ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites, UNESCO's main adviser in matters concerning conservation and protection of the heritage), points out, they risk falsifying archaeological values. This risk is especially high given the lack of expertise in fine art restoration.
These may seem to be technical matters, and indeed they are; but the wider problem is that monuments are not just piles of stone -- they are symbols appropriated and contested by a variety of actors. This has been especially obvious in the past few years, and particularly in the case of monuments relevant to Islamic culture in one way or another.
During the summer of 1999, the Serbian army and paramilitary forces attempted to eradicate Kosovo's Islamic heritage before they withdrew, damaging or destroying "by fire, dynamite or artillery" large swathes of history: 219 of its 607 mosques (most dating from the Ottoman period); three of the four historical city centres; 90 per cent of the extant traditional stone dwellings; and many Ottoman residences, according to an article (Cairo Times, 22-28 February 2000) by Said Zulficar, secretary-general of Heritage Without Borders and a member of the World Monuments Watch independent panel of experts.
The following year, the Saudi Joint Relief Committee for the People of Kosovo and Chechnya offered to restore a 16th-century mosque complex in western Kosovo, a task it interpreted as "bulldozing the cemetery, the library, and the madrasa" to make room for a "large concrete Islamic Center." It also intended to erase the 18th- and 19th- century mural frescoes and ornaments, in keeping with the tenets of Wahhabi Islam, which prohibits marking graves with elaborate headstones or mausolea and generally opposes ornamental details, especially realist depictions of human or animal forms. The same organisation had been responsible for pulling down other Ottoman mosques in Kosovo and approximately 150 Ottoman structures in Bosnia, which were replaced by reinforced concrete boxes. The UAE, too, had made the continuation of its humanitarian aid conditional upon the demolition of a 15th-century cemetery in northern Kosovo.
And on 14 October, after the Taliban's widely publicised annihilation of the Bamiyan Buddhas, hundreds of right-wing Hindu militants stormed the Taj Mahal, defacing the white marble walls with graffiti -- an act of vandalism that was certainly not as permanently destructive (archaeology officials were confident that the damage could be repaired), but that was also far less reported on, albeit ultimately no different as far as objectives were concerned. The BJP militants, according to the Pakistani English-language newspaper Dawn, "seemed inspired by their former youth wing president and Sports Minister Uma Bharti's 'fiery' speech against terrorism," in which he had stated: "The US has announced it would take on countries that harbour terrorists. In my opinion, the religion which promotes terrorism definitely gets destroyed."
In Jerusalem, too, the architectural heritage's subjection to, and entwinement with, more blatantly political matters have been in evidence. For over a year, the Israeli authorities prevented the UN's special envoy to Jerusalem, Professor Oleg Grabar, from entering the Old City's archaeological sites to verify their condition under occupation. Last July, Oda Lehmann, the official in charge of the Jerusalem portfolio at UNESCO, told the Weekly: "UNESCO is not a superpower, and does not have an army to protect these sites. It can only exercise moral pressure..." More importantly, Ahmed Abdel-Razeq, permanent observer for Palestine at the international organisation, noted: "Israel has no legal or accepted claim to sovereignty over Jerusalem; therefore it has no right to block access to the city."
In Cairo, there may be no war raging; but the conflict over the built heritage is no less intense for all that. And here, too, survival is at stake: that of the inhabitants who stand to lose their homes and livelihoods if they are moved forcibly out of the areas targeted for transformation; that of the Supreme Council for Antiquities, whose present budget is generated exclusively from tourism revenues; that of the four construction firms responsible for implementing the restoration programme; and finally, that of the monuments themselves.
It would be a pity for everyone concerned, then, if time limits and lack of specific restoration expertise were to result in the creation of a shining, marble-clad open-air museum, cut off from the urban fabric that created and sustained the monuments. For the authorities, indeed, such a result would be truly disastrous, since it could deprive Islamic Cairo of the very qualities that made it one of the first sites to be inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1979. The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention stipulate that a "cultural heritage resource" must be authentic in design, materials, workmanship and setting to be included on the list. "The value of a monument," Lam'i told Al-Ahram Weekly, "resides in its historicity, in the authenticity of the building materials employed."
Such conditions clearly do not obtain at the Mosque of Amr Ibn Al-Aas, for instance, where concrete columns and reinforced concrete roofing were introduced in the late 1970s. An extreme case, its reproduction elsewhere is not entirely implausible, and could have even more disastrous consequences: at the Fortress of Babylon, in fact, the pumping of ground water has caused foundation failure. Less immediately obvious are the problems at the Mosque of Al-Azhar; yet Zeynep Ahunbay, the chair of Turkey's ICOMOS committee, who visited the site after restoration was complete, described the work as "done very hastily and maybe not always supervised by conservation experts."
And while hasty and inappropriate intervention may not necessarily result in the monuments' physical destruction, as Lam'i indicates, it will, at best, mean that structures restored only a few years ago at great cost must be restored yet again as defects in the work appear. Nor is this a question of conflicting cultural takes on proper methods of restoration, for there is an Arabic proverb admirably suited to the situation: "He tried to beautify her with kohl, but blinded her instead."
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