‘To Revive Authenticity’ on Sharia al-Muizz

By Frederick Deknatel

The Sabil-Kuttab of ‘Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda is at the fork on Sharia al-Muizz just north of the monumental Mamluk funerary complexes of Qalawun and Barquq. It was built four centuries after those landmarks, in 1744, by an amir “noted for his high style of living and his liberal patronage of the arts,” in the words Caroline Williams, Cairo’s longtime architectural historian. It’s an epitaph that, I imagine, Farouk Hosny, the ex-Minister of Culture and Mubarak’s longest serving confidante, would like to own someday.

Hosny positioned himself at the head of the pyramid of ministries and bureaucracies that administered the Historic Cairo Restoration Project, the more than a decade long refurbishment of al-Muizz that was launched by presidential decree in 1998. The ministry of housing and the Cairo governorate were major partners in the project, but Hosny made sure he and his ministry had the most power over planning and especially purses. Numbers are vague, as with most things bureaucratic in Egypt. But the Historic Cairo project’s budget has been described at over LE 850 million, with al-Muizz getting the majority of that share for the restoration of historic buildings (as well as the stylistically bland beautification of Muizz’s modern, concrete ones), the leveling and repaving of the street, and the installation of the LED lights that now illuminate Fatimid Cairo’s historic avenue at night.

After January 25^th the police enforcement of Muizz as a pedestrian zone, with heavily regulated car traffic, ended – police had other things to do. A walk down Muizz in the daytime now requires dodging busy car traffic, and risking having your foot run-over by a car wedging its way down the street, between the narrow sidewalk and a crowd outside a fish stand. When this happened to me last August, my foot was surprisingly fine – and the driver smiled sheepishly and threw up his hands in soft apology. A walk down Muizz in the evening is closer to Hosny’s vision, since the buildings glow every night in LED radiance, including a strange stream of purple outside the entrance to the madrasa of Barquq.

Early on in the Muizz restoration, Williams and other international architects and historians criticized the Egyptian government and its culture ministry for the project’s view of heritage tourism as “the ultimate panacea for the Islamic monuments in Cairo.” Williams spoke for many critics when she slammed the Muizz project: it wasn’t preservation but a scheme, she wrote, “of turning medieval Cairo into a sanitized tourist district featuring inauthentic but atmospheric monuments deprived of their living character.”

The ministry and the Supreme Council of Antiquities hosted a conference in 2002 to stem such bad press. The heavy text produced and published for the conference, called simply Historic Cairo, outlined the Muizz project monument by monument, since a lack of documentation was a unifying critique. But the language used by Hosny in his haughty introduction betrayed the government’s long-held view that Egyptians must be separated from their urban and architectural heritage. “It has been crucial to redress the afflictions that have debilitated Cairo as a result of the vicissitudes of its long history and the infringements of successive generations of inhabitants,” Hosny wrote. “Such transgressions have been due to the pressing need to gain a livelihood, impelling individuals to encroach upon the unparalleled monuments that history has entrusted us with.” 

In other words, everyday Egyptians, particularly those working in workshops in Gamaliya, are a threat to Islamic monuments and their tourist potential, rather the living inhabitants, even the custodians, of an historic city. Public involvement was the last thing on the mind of the planners of the Muizz project. As a philosophy for preservation, and indeed urban and economic development, this idea of separating people from space and architecture, and relocating them altogether, spread throughout the Mubarak regime. The ministry of housing and its subsidiary General Office of Physical Planning, the force behind the fantasy of Cairo 2050, practiced urban planning as a tool for regime preservation and profit. Their “wide-range strategic plan for Greater Cairo” hinged on how to maximize the speculative potential of the desert cities and clear the informal, urban fabric near the Nile to make way for high-rises and elite real estate, while turning all of historic Cairo, from Gamaliya all the way south to Sultan Hassan and Ibn Tulun, into “The Open Museum, Fatimid Cairo.” Muizz was the model for historic Cairo in this authoritarian vision. The oldest quarters of the city – where workshops and craftsmen, some traditional, some not, cluster among medieval mosques, tombs, and forgotten palaces – would become an “open-air museum” home to streets “free from traffic and haggling,” as the New York Times wrote of Muizz after its reopening.

“To revitalise this street is to revive authenticity,” Hosny wrote proudly in the introduction to another book on the Muizz refurbishment, a glossy, hardcover text published recently by the ministry of culture, called simply The Great Street. But what was the regime’s idea of authenticity? Hosting the minister of culture’s galas and elite parties in the restored complex of Qalawun? Adapting every restored wikala into another “cultural center” that mostly sits empty?

The storefronts on the most northern stretch of Muizz, outside the mosque of al-Hakim and Bab al-Futuh, were cleared of their bustling onion and lemon markets, replaced with rows of shisha shops. To this an architect working in Muizz told me, “The entire street is a shisha market! The entire medieval Cairo of our times is a shisha market!”

Read more from Frederick Deknatel on his blog, Hidden Cities.

This article will be available in Arabic in a forthcoming Cairobserver print publication.

Update February 10: A water pipe burst on the evening of Feb 10 causing severe flooding in the historic street. Water pipes were replaced as part of the renovation project described above. The problem was later resolved.