'An assembly of wonders'
The Glory of Cairo: An Illustrated History, ed. André Raymond, Cairo: AUC Press, 2002. pp492
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Iraqi POWs taken captive in the Iranian town of Khuminshahr on the day of its liberation, on May 1982, after 20 months of Iraqi occupation
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The Glory of Cairo: An Illustrated History, is a door stopper of a book, an English translation of the original French edition (Edito-Editions Citadelles & Mazenod) presented as a handsome cased volume of almost 500 pages, and copiously illustrated.
A scholarly introduction to urbanism, though with the kind of glossy large format text-to-picture ratio that is most commonly disparaged as coffee-table it does, on occasion, fall thuddingly between two or more stools. An element of schizophrenia is perhaps inevitable in a volume that takes us from the fifth millennium BC to the development of Cairo's satellite cities, that can include, and relevently so, photographs of a 15th century BC inscribed architectural stone block of silicified limestone from Gebel Ahmar, details of an embroidered medallion from the late eleventh century Veil of St Anne, an archive photograph of Lois Fuller in full garb before the Sphinx, Jean-Denis Maillart's 1946 portrait of the late, and much missed, Hassan Aziz Hassan, and a desultory image of the half-complete and far from alluring Gardenia Park development in 6 October City taken in 1999. Sections of the volume might also serve as a reasonable introduction to the cultural life of Egypt during nationalism's most heroic phase (cue images of Egypt's Awakening, Mahmoud Mukhtar, 1920- 1928 and a still, with Youssef Chahine and Hind Rustum from the film Bab Al-Hadid, 1958, among others), a primer to economic activity within the city under Ottoman rule, a lamentation for architectural landmarks, both ancient and modern, lost or otherwise abused (there are copious quotations from the descriptions of no longer extant ancient monuments by mediaeval chroniclers, along with pristine images of buildings from the modern period that, if extant, are certainly not pristine.)
André Raymond has, then, edited a volume the trade mark of which is Catholicity, a necessary feature of any work attempting to excavate the glory of this particular city. The list of contributors he has assembled is impressive: Jean-Pierre Corteggiani, director of scientific and technical relations at the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, Cairo, tackles the site of the city from the primeval era to the Arab invasions; Sylvie Denoix, a researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Paris, deals with the early Arab period; Jean-Claude Garcin, professor of mediaeval Islamic history, University of Aix-en-Provence, tackles Cairo under the Ayyubids and the Mamelukes while Ghislaine Alleaume and Mercedes Volait, director of the Centre d'Etudes et de Documentation Juridiques et Sociales, Cairo and a researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Paris, respectively, undertake descriptions of the metropolis in the 19th and 20th centuries, under the chapter heading "The Age of Transition". Raymond himself, a former director of the Institut Français d'Etudes Arabes, Damascus, and the Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe and Musulman, Aix-en-Provence, undertakes the period between 1517 and 1798 in "Cairo under the Ottomans", the longest of the chapters included, certainly in terms of text, though by a narrow margin.
It is in the nature of this enterprise, a part of the territory, that approaches should differ, with Raymond adopting by far the most democratic. His is perhaps the least architectural of focuses, certainly among those tackling a still topographically identifiable city, not least because "great monuments in the Imperial style were built mostly in the early period of Ottoman rule, when the authority of the pashas was undisputed."
With the mosques of Sulayman Pasha (1528), Sinan Pasha (1571) and Malika Safiya (1610) duly despatched, their antecedents and political significance confined to a paragraph, "that", we are told, "was where Ottomanization stopped", though "it was quite clearly for purely political reasons (his desire to reaffirm his loyalty to the Imperial dynasty, following 'Ali Bey's abortive attempt at independence) that in 1774, Muhammad Bey Abu Dhahab erected opposite the al-Azhar [see photograph] a monument that was a straight copy of the mosque built two centuries earlier by Sinan Pasha in Bulaq." Which leaves plenty of room for surveys of a more general type, of economic activity, municipal administration, social divisions, cultural life. Tellingly, Raymond also includes a section on bourgeois domestic architecture, an area more or less ignored elsewhere.
While the chapters dealing with the earliest periods of Cairene history are likely to be of least interest to the non-specialist -- they do, after all, bear only the most tenuous of relationships to the city through which we still walk -- surprising continuities are pointed, most strikingly the endless process to which the city has been subjected for as long as it has existed: Cairo defies completion, refuses finishing and ruthlessly cannibalises itself. This latter habit has long been lamented: in the late 12th or early thirteenth century "Abd al-Latif, an 'Arab doctor from Baghdad'" provides, in his Account of Egypt (quoted by Jean- Pierre Corteggiani), a despairing description of the state of Memphis and an early denunciation of architectural vandalism: "Despite the vast extent of this town and the fact that it dates back to early Antiquity, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of the various governments under whose yoke it has successively been placed, whatever the efforts various people have made to destroy it, getting rid of every single vestige and obliterating every last trace of it, carrying away the stones and materials of which it was built, laying waste its buildings, mutilating the figures that ornamented them; nevertheless, despite what four-thousand years and more must have added to so many causes of destruction, its ruins still offer the eyes of onlookers an assembly of wonders that confounds the intelligence..."
The reappearance of bits and pieces of those wonders elsewhere, in later buildings, is well known: Pyramids were being ruthlessly exploited for masonry at least as early the mid-Roman period, by the second century AD, a habit that would continue whenever Cairo experienced a building boom. The process of attrition, though, has become telescoped in the modern period: however generous the allowances made for the advertising component in the image of the Orasdi-Back department store in Abdel-Aziz Street reproduced on this page it remains difficult to recognise the building as the Omar Effendi outlet it is today, and this despite a recent attempt at restoration that has involved painting the one-time flag-ship store coral pink. Such are the dilemmas with which Mercedes Volait deals in the final chapter of The Glory of Cairo. And if, in "The Modern Metropolis" , sub-titled "From the Nasser Era to Infitah", there is a cursory nod towards the imperatives of Nasserite political economy, the photographs tell their own story.
There is also a kind of pictorial, post-Infitah appendix, in the form of a pictorial essay: if "the Mubarak era will always be associated with the rebuilding of the capital's infrastructure", as the sub- section carrying the optimistic title "Rebuilding the infrastructure and protecting heritage" has it, the explication of that association, for reasons of space or otherwise, is restricted to a page. All the better, perhaps, to leave room for photographs of the First Residence building and Four Seasons Hotel, Ahmed Mito's Constitutional Court on the Maadi Corniche, the new Dar Al-Ifta building on Salah Salem street. These, combined with images of new developments in the satellite cities that surround Cairo make for a depressing coda to a volume that may well become essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the protean splendours of Cairo.
Those splendours, whatever the efforts in the accompanying essays made to contextualise them, appear shiny and new in the pages of this book. It is simply, perhaps, a function of the detail -- overviews, pictorially, are here noticeable by their virtual absence -- that makes everything look so pristine, that makes of the details of the city here photographed so alien to its inhabitants. The camera, after all, is the most consummate of liars, which need not be unvirtuous, and certainly will not if it makes us look at things anew.
In the absence of photographic evidence the usual suspects have all been trawled, the Description de l'Égypte, the illustrations of Pascale Coste, the work of Orientalist painters, engraved newspaper illustrations. In addition, the picture researchers explored archive collections, uncovering the occasional eccentricities, including an image of windmills on the Giza plateau, and the picture of Lois Fuller already mentioned. Architectural drawings also furnish material for the ultimate chapter: there is something hopelessly touching about the crayon and gauche design for a hotel room at Cairo airport, 1947-52, reproduced here from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. This is modernism at its most sanitised: a hygenic utilitarianism in elegant silhouettes. It was not built, and had it been build would undoubtedly have been refurbished in more opulent style decades ago. Such is the nature of a city unvarnished.
And it is the unvarnished aspects of the city, its refusal to fix an image, that will make a perfect stocking filler for any one who loves this place. Just make sure they have a big enough stocking.
Reviewed by Nigel Ryan
