Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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This week I will write about a group of visitors of Egypt who do not fall in any of the categories I have mentioned before. They are diplomats or wives of diplomats or married to Egyptians and whom one cannot really call visitors. Most of them stay for between two and four years, in case of diplomats, or permanently in the case of those married to Egyptians. Some of them have a literary flair and often produce books on Egypt, and some develop a certain leaning for a specific side of Egyptian life and history.

One of these is Lady Hilary Weir, wife of the former British ambassador in Egypt, Sir Michael Weir. While in Egypt she developed an interest, indeed an attachment to mediaeval Cairo, so much so that she used to organise what she called "rambles in Cairo", taking groups around her favourite parts of the city. Eventually Lady Weir published them in Cairo Today then, later on, in book form.

Lady Weir, OBE, diplomat and charity worker, was born on 31 May, 1945. She died of cancer on 2 November, 2008, aged 63. Lady Weir calls Cairo "Egypt's Peerless City". In fact she published a series of articles for Country Life magazine under this title, in which she described mediaeval Cairo yesterday and today. She believes that for half a millennium, until the Renaissance in Europe, Cairo was the centre of the Mediterranean world. Its reputation was unrivalled, its wonder extravagantly praised, mother of all cities, boundless in multitudes of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, as Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveler, wrote when he visited Cairo in 14th century.

The mosque of Al-Azhar, writes Lady Weir, was the university of all Islam; the colourful streets and alleys were the settings for the Arabian Nights. Trade and industry flourished. For the 15th century Venetian Emmanuelle Piloti, Cairo was quite simply "the greatest city in the world|. The writer deplores the fact that while people would flock to see Notre Dame or the ruins of Fountains Abbey they ignored their counterparts in Cairo. They used the city as a dormitory from which to visit the Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza and the Old Kingdom necropolis at Saqqara before heading south to the wonders of Thebes.

Cairo's development followed the changing course of the Nile and the whims of successive invaders. It owes its identity to Islam, but the nucleus of what was to become the first Arab city was settled by the Persians in the late 6th century BC. They picked a site some 10 miles to the north of ancient Memphis, the Old Kingdom Capital, and named it Babylon. The site was strategically chosen, near the Nile Valley's junction with the fertile Delta, protected to the east by a spur of the Moqattam Hills, opposite the island of Roda, which eased the task of crossing the river, and close to the ancient canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea.Babylon flourished during the period of Greek domination. The Romans strengthened it by building a major fort, and the early converted Copts erected there some of the earliest churches in Christendom. It was thus at the gates of Babylon, 1100 years after the Persian invasion, that the Arab general Amr Ibn Al-Aas encamped with his troops in AD 641. Then she goes on to trace the development of Fustat, which now lies in ruins, on which is built the Mosque of Amr the extant structure which, she claims, owes very little to that built and named after the Arab general. In its heyday the Mosque seldom contained fewer than 5000 people at a time, praying, studying, listening to sermons. It remained the focus of spiritual and intellectual life until Fustat's destruction in 1168.The author then goes on to Ibn Tulun, whom she describes as a Turkish slave dispatched by the Caliph in Iraq to govern his lucrative life. Eventually Ibn Tulun made himself independent of the corrupt Caliph court, built up a private army and quartered it to the northeast of Fustat, seeking the clean air carried by the prevailing northerly winds. His city, Al-Katai, with its polo squares and palaces, has now vanished but the mosque survives substantially unchanged and is both to many the second oldest and finest Islamic structure in Cairo, one of the outstanding monuments of all Islam.

The author then goes on to give details of the mosque, its different wings, the brick it was built with and the incised stucco friezes of geometric and formalised plant designs.Then came the Fatimid dynasty, a Shiite dynasty that came from what is now Tunisia. The general Gawhar was determined to found a palace city worthy of his Caliph Al-Muizz. It is said that the astrological sign of the moment was Mars, hence the city was called Al-Qahira, the victorious. Thus Cairo acquired its name, and Jawhar's enclosure gave birth to the glories of architecture and civilisation which earned Cairo its mediaeval fame.

During two and half centuries of Fatimid rule Al-Qahira was the exclusive domain of the Caliph and his retinue. No one was allowed to ride beyond the gates and it is said that even ambassadors and representatives of foreign countries going to meet with the Caliph had to get out of their carriages or off their donkeys or horses and walk through the gates until they reach the palace.