Historic Cairo - rehabilitation of Cairo's historic monuments

Architectural Review, The, March, 1998 by Jim Antoniou

Cairo is the greatest city of Africa and perhaps of the whole Muslim world. But the extremely precious historic core, from which today's huge metropolis grew, is in great danger. Jim Antoniou explains how the city developed and how lessons can be derived from the past to give hope of a living city genre.

Historic Cairo is the crumbling core of the largest city in Africa. The city now spreading over more than 450sq km, occupied by some 16 million people, has severe housing shortages and an unemployment rate of 20 per cent. In contrast to the metropolitan area, many of the historic district are ruinous and given over to virtual slums. Here, poverty, unemployment and illiteracy are combined with a lack of awareness of the value of historic buildings.

Yet historic Cairo has a distinctive architectural identity and contains the largest concentration of Islamic monuments in the world, both in quality and in quantity. The historic components are included in Unesco's Heritage List, on a par with Venice. Among Cairo's monuments are mosques, mausolea and madrasas (religious schools) built by prominent patrons between the seventh and nineteenth centuries.

There are also hammams (public baths), palaces, houses, city gates and wakalas (courtyard buildings combining multi-floor living units on the upper storeys with commercial use at ground level). A type of building unique to Cairo was the sabil-kuttab: a covered water fountain to serve the community and a simple school for teaching young children to read the Koran on the upper level.

These renowned monuments are grouped into specific quarters, with significant areas converging on the citadel. In fact, the location of the citadel is crucial to the whole composition of historic Cairo, providing visual links between its immediate surroundings, the historic city and the extensive cemeteries. To describe the role of these components of Cairo unfolds the history of the city's development.

Beginnings

Old Cairo is the pre-Islamic area to the south, not far from the River Nile. This sit is related to that of the Roman fort which guarded the Nile crossing. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, many churches were built there. Numerous Coptic monuments survive to this day.

Al-Fustat (meaning an army camp) was the capital founded close to the Christian fort when Muslin armies marched through Sinai to bring Islam to Africa in AD 641. Here, the Arab conqueror, Amr Ibn al-As built the first mosque in Africa, now extensively rebuilt out of all recognition.

Successive rulers built their own new towns on high ground towards the north of al-Fustat. Al-Askar was founded in 752, although nothing remains of this settlement. Some 120 years later, a new conqueror, Ahmed Ibn Tulun built a town called al-Qata'i. Hardly anything remains of the original town (about the size of the City of London), except the magnificent mosque of Ibn Tulun, still the largest place of worship in Cairo. When this complex was completed in the ninth century, Venice was nothing more than a collection of timber huts.

By 974, a new princely city named al-Qahira was built by the conquering Fatimids, this time with walls and several gates to keep the rulers apart from the inhabitants of al-Fustat. Later, the name al-Qahira (the Victorious) was corrupted by Italian traders into the modern Cairo. The only surviving buildings of this period are al-Azhar mosque (subsequently modified over the centuries) and the theological college (established in 989). However, the present street pattern still reflects the original alignment of thoroughfares, as in the main spine al-Muizz al-Din Street and almost parallel to the east, al-Gamaliya Street. Some of the physical remains still belong to the Fatimid period, with fine examples of richly decorated facades in solid masonry (for example, the exquisite al-Aqmar mosque, the spectacular north wall with its two impressive gates and Bab Zwaylla dominating the entrance to the south). For the first time, a distinctive architectural style was created in the historic city which set high standards for buildings over the centuries that followed.

At first, the two cities lived distinctly, with separate lives, even though they were within walking distance from each other. Al-Qahira was the seat of the Khalif. Common people could only enter the royal city by special permit. In al-Fustat, not unlike the historic city today, there were many ruined houses. This was partly due to the system of joint ownership of properties, leading to frequent disputes and chronic neglect of repairs. It was also partly due to the high cost of trained labour, compared to low rents.

The combined population of the two cities was about 500 000, making it one of the largest urban centres in the eleventh century. Here, goods could be bought from as far away as Western Europe or as remote as China.

From the encampment at al-Fustat grew the Muslin capital, leading to the sprawling giant of modern Cairo of today. Archaeologists regard al-Fustat as a major excavation site, with valuable information, particularly in the firm of documents and artifacts, relating to living conditions. Others see its 300 hectare extent as a valuable piece of real estate, in a city where pressure for land remains acute, particularly due to its proximity to the capital's central area.