Issue No. 596
Culture
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25 - 31 July 2002 Issue No. 596 Culture |
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Obituary: Laila Ali Ibrahim (1917-2002)
Laila Ali Ibrahim passed away last Sunday, 14 July. She was 85. For the last five years she had suffered from a severe degenerative condition that confined her to her bed and robbed her of her memory, preventing her friends from seeing her for almost all that time. This was especially painful for those of us who do not live in Egypt and who have grown accustomed to visiting Laila as an integral part of every trip to Cairo. Long ago many of us identified Laila with Cairo: it was an identification that went beyond the intellectual and scholarly association to the emotional and even existential one. Laila was the "godmother" of the city, guardian of its monuments, keeper of its stories and anecdotes, the personification of its spirit and beauty.
Laila was the daughter of Dr Ali Ibrahim, a pioneering surgeon and avid collector of art, especially Oriental carpets. She inherited from her father his incisive sense of observation, his interest in colour, form, and texture, and his love of Egypt, and of Cairo in particular. She managed to mould all of these qualities into her own unique persona to first become the premier connoisseur of the architectural splendours of Cairo and later their decipherer, protector, and ambassador to the Egyptian authorities and to the world. She did all of this through sheer will, relentlessly, and with tremendous passion. She never stopped until the end of her conscious life despite many setbacks occasioned both by the dramatically changing political atmosphere in late 20th-century Egypt and by the stubborn bigotry, indifference, and downright ignorance of many officials and scholars entrusted with the care of Cairo's monuments.
Laila received the education available to upper- class Egyptian girls of her generation but never attended university to study architectural history. She learned through exposure to the best minds concerned with the fate of historic Cairo in the 1940s and 1950s, especially her father, whom she adored, and K A C Creswell, the eccentric Briton who spent most of his working life studying the Islamic architecture of Cairo. In my opinion she managed to surpass them all. Not that she outresearched or outpublished the professional scholars: her scholarly output, robust as it was, remained modest. But she had one thing that most scholars of Cairo of her time did not have: total devotion to her subject and even total identification with it. This showed not only in her publications, public lectures, and participation in countless organisations safeguarding the monuments of Cairo, but also in her selfless and tireless efforts to gain new converts to the study and appreciation of Cairo.
She pursued this last goal on multiple levels. She single-handedly initiated a programme that took her to public schools in the historic districts of Al- Gamaliya and Al-Darb Al-Ahmar where she volunteered her time and knowledge to teach fifth and sixth graders about the heritage masterpieces that surrounded them. She used to say that these pupils needed a role model to imbue them with admiration for the monuments so that they did not mindlessly contribute to their further deterioration. And she was determined to be that role model amid the absence of alternatives among parents and regular teachers. Had there been a hundred Lailas we might have been spared the distress of watching many magnificent Cairene monuments ruined by irresponsible use or misuse.
On a more sophisticated level, Laila also taught the history of Cairo at the American University of Cairo (AUC). There, too, she imposed her hands-on method. Classes were often conducted at the sites themselves where students were encouraged to see, feel, touch, imagine, and then to measure, analyse and interpret the monuments, their histories and meanings. The quotidian field trips became so famous that many non-students wanted to attend them. Laila not only welcomed the additional attendance, she was gratified by it: she was convinced that, this way, she was gaining more enthusiasts for her beloved city.
But Laila did not limit her pedagogic engagement to schools and universities. She was at her best when she dealt with individuals or with small groups of scholars. She made herself available to any researcher, Egyptian or international, interested in studying the architecture and urban history of Cairo. She shared everything she knew about her city without any regard to scholarly rivalry. She took visiting students by the hand and showed them the jewels of Cairo, opened doors for them to visit monuments and consult archives and sources, and introduced them to like-minded scholars. She sometimes even hosted them in her house to consult her own library of books, manuscript copies and personal notes that she painstakingly collected over many years. This is how I came to know Laila. She adopted me after my first arrival in Egypt in 1985 and guided my every step in seeking to know, love and study Cairo. My indebtedness to her is immeasurable: everything I wrote on the city and its architecture carries some of her thoughts, observations, and wisdom.
Laila's own writing was less important to her than to share her knowledge and to ignite other people's minds to think and write about Cairo. Yet her articles and one published book are solid, carefully researched and clearly written pieces on purposefully chosen topics. She seemed to have focused mostly on little studied aspects of Cairene architecture that lesser scholars avoided because they were not easily accessible or not popular enough. She took special interest, for instance, in Mameluk residential architecture, about which she published a number of erudite articles. She also delved into writing on little known or ruined monuments, such as the Khanqahs of Amir Qawsun and of Zayneddin Youssef or the Madrasa of Badreddin Al-'Ayni. Her book on Mameluk building terminology, published in 1990 and co-authored with the late Mohamed Mohamed Amin, is an indispensable source for all students of Cairo. It is the distillation of the expertise of these two irreplaceable scholars: Laila with her intimate and extensive knowledge of the historic buildings and Amin with his profound familiarity with the legal documents related to them.
Laila spent more than half a century studying, teaching, and speaking for and on behalf of the architecture of Cairo. The preservation of the historic city and the study of its buildings were certainly pivotal objectives she pursued throughout her life. But they were not the only causes she passionately embraced. Two other prickly issues -- freedom of expression and the liberation of women -- occupied her in her youth and early adulthood, and she spent considerable time and energy militating for them. She tried every possible way to raise consciousness about them, including direct action through her involvement in the Arab Socialist Union -- Gamal Abdel-Nasser's sole political forum -- and other governmental organisations. Her association with the outfits of a populist and authoritarian regime must have exacted a huge emotional toll on this aristocratic daughter of a pasha, who nonetheless led a very simple, even austere life. But for the sake of bettering the lives of Egyptian women and defending the right of her fellow citizens to speak freely in their country she had to concoct alliances with the representatives of the same regime that had confiscated the wealth of her family and imprisoned some of its members. She persevered for all of the 1960s and 1970s. Years later she was still candidly outspoken about both issues, although by then she had become bitter at the wasted opportunities to improve the conditions of women and the status of freedom that she had witnessed during her political interlude.
Despite a lifetime dedicated to working for Egypt and Egyptians Laila is not well known in her country. Ironically, this is due to the nature of her activities: personal, direct, blunt, altruistic, unassuming, and in many cases indifferent to rank and decorum. She shunned all celebratory social events and was interested only in useful, constructive ones. Her admirers, however, managed to modestly celebrate her achievements in a way that would have pleased her. They put together a collection of essays in her honour, The Cairo Heritage, edited by Dr Doris Abou Seif and published a year before Laila's death by AUC Press, although she unfortunately was unable to read it. Now that she is no longer with us we should remember her in similarly befitting ways. Perhaps her small but extremely valuable library could become the kernel of the Laila Ibrahim Centre: a centre for the study of the heritage of Cairo and Egypt, independent yet affiliated with an Egyptian institution of higher learning and open to researchers from all over the world. This is how Laila herself would have liked it to be.
Nasser Rabbat
The writer is Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT
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