Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
With all the appellations Cairo has received through the ages, I find Mother of the World most apt. But it does not mean that Um Al-Dunya was the only description she had, and here I treat her as a person: she was also Al-Mahrousa (the guarded) and "Egypt's peerless city". It was the great Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun who gave Cairo the name "Mother of the World".
When I was asked to write about Cairo, I thought of the dozens of books written about my favourite city: books that have spanned hundreds of yeas, from Lane's famous masterpiece Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians to Max Rodenbeck's Cairo City Victorious.
Most, if not all the books trace the history of Cairo, prior to, during and after the choice of the Fatimids in 969 to found "Al'Qahira", with its Al-Azhar Mosque there. What is really interesting is that Al-Qahira was originally founded around a bustan which, in modern terminology, is equal to park. In an article in Cairo: Revitalising a Historic Metropolis, published by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Nasser Rabat writes, "when the Fatimid army arrived in 1969, its general Jawhar Al Siqiulli was charged by his master, the Caliph Al-Muizz Li-Din Allah, to establish a new royal city." The general close an area around the Bustan Al-Kafuri and laid out an enclave which came to be known as Al Qahira. The Bustan was, in the words of Rabat, "a sizeable jardin de plaisance planned by Kafur Al-Ikhshidi the slave ruler of Egypt between 949 and 969, immediately before the Fatmid invasion."
In the mid-1960s a great festival was organised, at the suggestion of the then minister of culture, Sarwat Okasha, to celebrate the millenary of Cairo. The task of organising it was entrusted to one of our greatest thinkers, the late Magdi Wahba. He was at that time under-secretary of state for foreign cultural relations, a post which I was to occupy after his retirement.
It was a great festival with, literally, hundreds of research papers by participants from all over the world. One of them was Oleg Graber, a well- known historian of architecture at the Fogg Museum in Harvard University. His paper was about The Meaning of History in Cairo, on which he gave two kinds of information, as he said, followed by a set of questions.
Graber explained that Cairo is distinguished by many pasts. There is a sharp contrast between these different pasts. And yet the reality of the city itself, mingled them, mixed them in a symbiosis across historical periods. At what point, asks Graber, is it legitimate to decide that the city had reached a coherent equilibrium which would and should be preserved?
Having admitted the uniqueness of the Cairo monuments, he goes on to ask, what does the uniqueness mean today or for the future? What is it in the history of Cairo that allowed for its uniqueness? Bab Zeweila, in his opinion, is a sign of this uniqueness. From the aesthetic point of view it is absurdly placed, with a mosque that has an entirely different style of construction. But none of this matters, for all those disparate elements have been united by the life of the city, its endless activity, and the monuments are simply the almost accidental associations of continuous life.
Having given this rather academic expose of Cairo, I should now turn to what I believe to be a love story between writers and the city. But which city? Here we have a talk that I gave some years ago about one of the greatest modern historians, whose flare found expression in his love of Islamic Cairo, Caroline Williams. In my next column I shall write about this love.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/852/cu3.htm