Making Cairo Medieval addresses the urban and architectural evolution of Cairo during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interest in this topic has increased considerably over the past two decades, and this book is a recent example of this interest. For quite some time, a major source for the investigation of this subject remained Janet Abu Lughod’s highly regarded Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), even though the work addressed the overall evolution of Cairo, and its chronological scope therefore extended beyond the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since then, a number of publications addressing the subject have appeared, including André Raymond’s edited volume, The Glory of Cairo (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001). Although Raymond’s combination of urban history/coffee-table book also covers a much wider chronological scope than the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its coverage of the modern period is relatively detailed. Another recent publication is Urbanism Imported or Exported? edited by Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait (West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2003). Even though the book deals with cities in different parts of the world, two of its thirteen chapters are devoted to Cairo, and emphasize the city’s evolution during the nineteenth century.

Making Cairo Medieval concentrates on two somewhat concurrent and interconnected processes that affected the architectural and urban character of Cairo during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is that identified as modernization, of which an important manifestation was the opening of straight, wide boulevards that cut through older parts of the city and defined urban patterns in its newer parts. The modernization process also was expressed in the appearance of new building types (the Western-styled palace, the railroad station, the opera house, etc.) and new architectural vocabularies, basically those of the various historical revivals, which eventually included the Islamic revival. The second process is that which the authors of this publication identify as “medievalization,” and which was initiated at a later stage than the modernization process, during the second half of the nineteenth century. It concentrated on identifying, defining, studying, analyzing, and consequently preserving, restoring, and rehabilitating the city’s historical Islamic architectural and urban heritage.

The essays in Making Cairo Medieval are characterized and connected by their emphasis on a number of publications, public figures, and activities. The Description de l’Égypte, the multi-volume documentation of Egypt put together by the scholars accompanying Napoleon during his Egyptian expedition of 1798–1801, features heavily in the essays of this publication. As for local Egyptian rulers, Muhammad ‘Ali (r. 1805–48), the founder of the dynasty that governed Egypt—with various levels of effectiveness—from the early nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century, appears as a very important figure in the making of modern Cairo. No less important is his descendant Isma’il (r. 1863–79), who was responsible for the most extensive nineteenth-century physical urban interventions in the city. In terms of public officials, the one who features most prominently is ‘Ali Mubarak. Mubarak held a number of important governmental positions, including Minister of Public Works, and played a significant role in implementing the modernizing urban interventions that took place in Cairo during the reign of Isma’il. Mubarak also wrote extensively about his activities and about the world in which he lived. A number of the essays in Making Cairo Medieval deal substantially with the work of the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe (often simply referred to as the Comité), the partly private, partly official body that took on a very important role in defining, documenting, preserving, and restoring a number of historical monuments in Cairo over a relatively long time span that extended from 1881 to 1953. In terms of relatively recent monographs, two publications, Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Zeynep Celik’s Displaying the Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), feature prominently in a number of the book’s essays, as important references and often as sources of methodological guidance.

The publication’s first chapter is a relatively short introductory essay written by the three editors that elaborates on the book’s goal of providing a new look at the history of Cairo during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and briefly introduces the essays written by each of the contributors.

The second essay is “Disciplining the Eye: Perceiving Medieval Cairo” by Irene Bierman. This essay primarily addresses the manner in which foreigners represented Cairo. The conceptual basis for the essay is that a medieval Arab and/or Islamic Cairo within the emerging modern city was “fabricated” by a series of “actors” for certain “audiences,” all of whom were Westerners or members of a local elite. It should be further noted that this issue is complicated by the fact that Cairo traditionally had Christian and Jewish neighborhoods. Bierman adds that this process of fabrication was little connected to the experiences of the vast majority of local residents, even though it did effect them as the physical makeup of the city was rearranged to suit this newly fabricated character. The tools that defined and articulated this process included writings, visual representations, museum displays, and exhibitions in world fairs. These world fair exhibitions are described as stage settings and visual spectacles similar to modern-day descendants such as the national areas of Disney’s EPCOT center. Of great importance in the making of this medieval Cairo is the restoration of buildings, which contributed to creating what Bierman refers to as the “city as artifact,” and converted the whole city into a living museum. The emergence of the concept of medieval Cairo is presented in this essay within semi-conspiratorial overtones, with artists, architects, archaeologists, writers, statesmen, and international businessmen as conspirators whose aim was to appropriate the historical city from its original inhabitants and transform it into a commodity for their own cultural gratification.

The third essay is “The Medieval Link: Maqrizi’s Khitat and Modern Narratives of Cairo” by Nasser Rabbat. This essay provides considerable information about the encyclopedic work al-Mawa’iz wa-l-I’tibar bi Dhikr al-Khitat wa-l-Athar (often simply referred to as the Khitat), the fifteenth-century topographical/historical study of Cairo written by the Egyptian author Taqiyy al-Din al-Maqrizi. Rabbat presents the Khitat not only as a work of architectural and urban history, but also as a patriotic and emotional work that shows the intense attachment Maqrizi felt towards his home city, and as a political attack against the Mamluk rulers of his time, whom he viewed as corrupt and as destroyers of the Cairo he knew and loved. Rabbat consequently describes the Khitat as a work in which Maqrizi aims at creating a “realm of memory” for his beloved city. In doing so, he examined not so much the actions of players in history, but more the marks of their actions on the city.

Rabbat compares and contrasts the Khitat to works from the modern period that also aimed at representing the city. He begins with a comparison between the Khitat and the Description de l’Égypte, the latter of which brought a new epistemological approach to the representation of Egypt and Cairo, one belonging to an Encyclopedic enlightenment project dependent upon the empirical compilation of visual and textual evidence, on archival research, and on analysis. He also discusses another work with the title of Khitat, ’Ali Mubarak’s twenty-volume al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida, published in 1888–89. Although Mubarak was a dedicated modernizer and Westernizer, he nonetheless decided to follow the model of Maqrizi, rather than the Description, for his compendium, and depended entirely on text, bypassing any use of images (interestingly enough, Rabbat does not include any images in his article).

Rabbat continues this lineage of writings with the works of the architectural historian K.A.C. Creswell, who during the first half of the twentieth century thoroughly documented, in the form of text and image, all known Cairene monuments up to 1311. Some of the findings of this positivistic work may have been surpassed today, but the plans and descriptions provided by Creswell continue to be of importance and use. Rabbat also provides a critical overview of recent and contemporary Egyptian writers, both architectural historians and novelists, who dealt with Cairo. He points out that a number of them expressed an Egyto-centric bias, but nonetheless relied on the Orientalist models of studying Egypt they claimed to reject.

The fourth essay is “‘Ali Mubarak’s Cairo: Between the Testimony of ’Alamuddin and the Imaginary of the Khitat,” by Nezar Alsayyad. In many ways, this essay functions as a biography of ‘Ali Mubarak. In addition, it provides a comparison between Mubarak’s two written works, the Khitat and ’Alamuddin. The first is a work of documentation, and the second a work of fiction, which Alsayyad identifies as “arguably the first modern Egyptian novel.” Alsayyad adds that historians generally have been unfair and unkind to both works, often treating them as insignificant. In comparing the two, Alsayyad makes the remark that the Khitat is often “empty and contextless” without the details provided in ‘Alamuddin. For example, Mubarak mentions in the Khitat that in 1872 the Egyptian postal service delivered two million packages. In ’Alamuddin, however, he states that most Cairenes were unaware of the postal service and did not use it. It is as if Mubarak provides in ’Alamuddin the commentary and annotation that contextualizes the Khitat.

The fifth essay is “Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the City of the Arabian Nights,” by Derek Gregory. This essay concentrates on the manner in which Westerners represented Cairo to other Westerners through writings, and deals with representations of the people of Cairo and their habits more than with buildings and urban spaces. The essay concentrates on the writings of the nineteenth-century English author Edward William Lane, specifically his An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians Written in Egypt During the years 1833–1835, and his annotated (and edited) translation of The Thousand and One Nights (often referred to as The Arabian Nights). Gregory explains that Lane’s works were extremely important companions for English-speakers visiting Cairo, and presented to them an intertwining of the fantastic and the factual. The essay belongs to a discourse that emphasizes how Westerners viewed the Orient—in this case Cairo—as a “stage” for events that are mysterious and sensual, but also as a world they intended to explore and demystify. Consequently, the essay dwells on the idea of the “European’s gaze,” and has an abundance of statements such as “Lane reasserts a power that was at once Orientalist and masculinist: through his persistent, probing commentary, ‘the Orient’ was to be made transparent, its secrets laid bare, and its deceptions revealed” (84).

The sixth essay is “Nineteenth-Century Images of Cairo: From the Real to the Interpretative,” by Caroline Williams. Williams provides an overview of a number of Western painters/illustrators and photographers who represented Cairo during the nineteenth century. She begins with the artists of the Description, and moves on to cover later artists and architects such as Pascal Coste, Robert Hay, David Roberts, Frank Dillon, John Fredrick Lewis, Jean Leon Gérmôe, and Ludwig Deutsch. Regarding photography, she points out that this medium was introduced in Egypt soon after its development, and that the first photographs taken in Africa were those of Muhammad ’Ali and his family in Alexandria. She discusses the work of photographers who worked in Egypt such as Francis Frith, who stated that his photographs were more “truthful” than the drawings of his contemporary, David Roberts, but who also was aware of the limitations of the medium, especially when it came to documenting interaction between people or areas with dim lighting. Williams argues that these visual representations of Egypt shifted during the course of the nineteenth century from the documentary to the interpretative. She comments that in early illustrations such as those found in the Description, the people shown in the representations of sites and buildings are stiffly posed and scattered in the image primarily for scale. In contrast, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the architectural context in an increasing number of images gradually becomes merely a tool that frames the action taking place in the street. Thus, the emphasis moves from buildings to people, often with a stress on imaginary cultural narratives, as is the case with the paintings of Deutsch.

However, it should be kept in mind that all acts of visual representation are by default exercises in interpretation, and what needs to be explored and identified is the change in the nature of the interpretation, rather than a shift from the documentary to the interpretative. An example of this interpretative nature of representation is found in Pascal Coste’s L’Architecture Arabe ou Monuments du Kaire, which appeared in 1837–39, and is one of the earlier publications to document Cairo’s Islamic architectural heritage. When documenting a building such as al-Azhar mosque, the Beaux-Arts trained Coste seemed unable to acknowledge the fact that the plan of the monument had irregular corners that deviated from the ninety-degree angle, and consequently drew them as right-angled corners.

The seventh essay is Donald Preziosi’s “The Museum of What You Shall Have Been.” The essay identifies a process of “fabrication” of Egypt’s past in a manner that emphasizes “Eurocentric hegemony,” and in which “Egyptians appeared and Europeans looked.” Consequently, the author presents the restoration acts of the Comité as aimed at creating a “theme-parked façade of structures” and an “exoticized past” in conformity with “European fantasies” about what the city should be like. The author concentrates on the establishment of museums in Egypt, and provides an overview of the creation of the Egyptian Museum, the Museum of Arab Art (today known as the Islamic Museum), the Coptic Museum, and the Graeco-Roman Museum. He presents the creation of those museums as an Orientalist enterprise aimed at representing and reformatting Egypt’s history in an evolutionary narrative according to a “succession of stages leading inexorably to the presentness and modernity of the new Westernized nation-state” (135). Through this, the “entire country was reformatted as a scholarly or tourist itinerary” (133).

Although Preziosi presents an interesting conceptual framework for understanding the creation of museums in Egypt, his knowledge of Cairo clearly is far from intimate. For example, he refers in his essay to an official body that he names the “government of Cairo.” It is very strange to identify an autonomous local governing body within the highly centralized system of governance developed under the Muhammad ‘Ali dynasty. I assume he is referring to the Governorate of Cairo, which in fact was under the jurisdiction of a central governmental body, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior. However, the more serious lapse in accuracy occurs when he mentions the new Cairo that “featured long, broad boulevards, which the mid-century ruler of Egypt, Muhammed ’Ali, commissioned after viewing the work of Hausmann in Paris” (134). There unfortunately are too many historical errors in this one phrase. The relatively minor errors in this statement are that Muhammad ’Ali ruled from 1805 to 1848, a period that primarily falls outside the mid-century; and he died in 1849, before Baron Haussmann (not Hausmann, as his name is spelled in this essay and throughout the book) became Prefect of the Seine Department in 1854. The more serious error is that Preziosi is confusing Muhammad ’Ali with his descendant Isma’il (who ruled from 1863 to 1879, a period that also falls outside the mid-century). This confusion is not a minor lapse. The basics of any understanding of the urban development of Cairo during the nineteenth century need to incorporate a comparison, if not a contrast, between the interventions of each of the two rulers in the city.

The eighth essay is “Nineteenth-Century Cairo: A Dual City?” by Heba Farouk Ahmed. Although the author states at the beginning of the essay that it is not her “intent . . . to revisit the ‘Orientalist discourse’” (143), that is exactly what she sets about doing. The essay emphasizes that Cairo was experienced differently by Westerners and Egyptians, and that the manner of how Cairo was viewed by Egyptians “has been largely forgotten in favor of that history imposed by foreigners” (144), a representation that presented Cairo as a set of binary opposites between Oriental and Westernized, old and new, as well as traditional and modern. Consequently, when discussing the creation of a modern Cairo, she argues that “few scholars have considered Cairenes as participants in this native project of modernity—or considered their works as necessary sources” (167). We consequently are reminded once again that Western writings on Egypt “resulted largely in a commodification of the city and its people for the European consumer of Orientalism” (166), and that “the ‘dual’ city paradigm . . . was largely an ethnocentric platform that helped drive foreign travel writing in the nineteenth century” (167).

The ninth essay is Khaled Fahmy’s “Modernizing Cairo: A Revisionist Narrative.” As the title indicates, this essay aims at revising accepted narratives of Cairo’s modernization process during the nineteenth century, and specifically aims at challenging the “Eurocentric implication of the ‘Paris-as-model’” (179) argument for the modernization of the city. According to Fahmy, this model overemphasizes the importance of the transformations carried out in Cairo under the direction of Khedive Isma’il. They also overemphasize how those changes were brought about as a result of Isma’il’s visit to Paris in 1867, and the role of Isma’il’s French-educated Minister of Public Works, ‘Ali Mubarak, in implementing those transformations. In addition, Fahmy critiques the opinion that such transformations of the city were brought about primarily because of aesthetic considerations, and instead emphasizes the importance of other factors such as the concern for public hygiene, which he states has been ignored by traditional accounts of the modernization of Cairo during the nineteenth century. He stresses that the urban transformations implemented under Isma’il provide a continuation of policies established since the 1840s (and earlier) during the reign of Muhammad ’Ali. In doing so, he carries out valuable explorations of primary contemporary sources including those of the Egyptian National Archives.

Although Fahmy sheds light on new information uncovered through his research, his reconsideration of the significance traditionally given to Isma’il and Mubarak in transforming Cairo is of a quantitative rather than qualitative nature. Also, Muhammad ‘Ali’s concern for issues of public hygiene, and his straightening and widening of roads in Cairo for a variety of reasons, including the accommodation of the movement of the wheeled carriage (primarily his own), is well known, and have been mentioned by authors such as Mercedes Volait (including in her contributions to The Glory of Cairo and Urbanism Imported or Exported?) and even Janet Abu Lughod in her Cairo book. At the same time, the importance of “Paris-as-model” to Isma’il and other Egyptians cannot be underestimated. For example, Fahmy himself states how Isma’il had the Qasr al-Nil Bridge and the Jazira Palace built specifically for the use of (and consequently to impress) the French Empress Eugénie during her 1869 Cairo visit. One may debate issues such as the extent of the influence of Paris on the making of Cairo under Isma’il, or the extent of the role of Muhammad ’Ali in the physical transformation of the city, but it is impossible to deny either. Ultimately, Fahmy’s reconsiderations end up more as examples of academic hair-splitting than historical revisionism.

The tenth essay is “Medievalization of the Old City as an Ingredient of Cairo’s Modernization: Case Study of Bab Zuwayla,” by Nairy Hampikian. The essay provides a detailed study of the documentation and interventions that took place in and around Bab Zuwayla, the eleventh-century Fatimid-era gate, specifically those brought about by the Comité. Through the case study of Bab Zuwayla, the essay provides detailed information about the manner in which the Comité functioned. Reading the essay (at least until the conclusion), it is difficult not to feel a sense of admiration regarding the professionalism and dedication that the members of the Comité expressed towards the historical monuments of Cairo. Admittedly, modern conservators would not approve of certain practices of the Comité, such as the rejection of historical accretions to which a monument might have been subjected during the course of its history. This also applies to the Comité’s occasional willingness to sacrifice more recent historical monuments or additions to monuments dating to the Ottoman era, an undertaking partly brought about as a result of political compromises the Comité had to make in order to protect earlier monuments, and partly because of its members’ lack of appreciation of the relatively more recent components of Cairo’s heritage. Still, in spite of the positive contributions made by the Comité, we come across a number of writings that view it primarily as an example of Western cultural domination that imposed its own Eurocentric vision in terms of defining Cairo’s architectural and urban heritage. Even Hampikian’s essay succumbs to this tendency in its concluding remarks, where it is stated that the Comité concentrated on creating picturesque images that would be acceptable to a Western-oriented clientele, and therefore, in its search for an “original appearance” for Cairo, “authenticity often had to be refabricated” (224). The author takes this argument a step further by stating that although the conservation efforts of the Comité often clashed with the efforts of modernizers in Cairo such as ’Ali Mubarak, both sides ended up using the same strategy, which is to “tame the old to be appropriately presented beside the new, shiny, and modern Cairo” (227).

The final essay is “The Cemeteries of Cairo and the Comité de Conservation,” by May al-Ibrashy. As with the preceding essay, the focus here is on the efforts of the Comité, specifically in relation to Cairo’s historical cemeteries. The essay provides an overview of how modernization efforts—and with them conservation efforts—relating to Cairo reached the cemetery zones relatively late since they were the last part of the city to be subjected to the physical forces of modernization. The author mentions that the Comité made serious efforts in terms of researching the monuments of the cemeteries, but adds that it also “extract[ed] the ‘monument’ from the ‘shrine’ . . . and create[d] a new narrative that emphasized art history over cultic memory” (236). She adds that the Comité accordingly considered the needs of local visitors and worshippers to these shrines to be secondary to the needs of “a new competitive ‘consumer,’ the Western cultural tourist” (237). Once again, the position put forward is that whatever professional conservation efforts the Comité may have promoted were subjugated by a Eurocentric cultural agenda that primarily viewed the architectural and urban heritage of Cairo as a commodity to be enjoyed by the Western eye.

Making Cairo Medieval provides valuable additions to the knowledge of the evolution of Cairo during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, a few criticisms may be made of this publication. A relatively minor criticism concerns the transliteration of Arabic names and terms found. Although the transliteration in a number of the essays is almost impeccable, in others, it leaves much to be desired. This is especially evident in the second and fourth essays. A selected list of transliteration errors in the second essay includes using madrassa rather than madrasa, gallabaya rather than gallabiyya, Qala’un rather than Qalawun, and so on. In the fourth essay, Isma’iliyya becomes Isma’ilya, waqfiyya becomes waqffiya[t], Qadima becomes Qaddima, al-Mawa’iz wa-l-I’tibar becomes al-Mawaz wa al’Atabar, etc. Although one may argue that these transliteration errors are no more than minor lapses, such a lack of a unified, consistent system of transliteration in a number of the essays does undermine the quality of the monograph.

A more serious criticism of this publication is a methodological one. The dependence of a good number of the essays on the critique of Orientalism is a liability. A significant part of this critique of the Orientalist discourse has become repetitive, predictable, and consequently tired. It is time to supersede it. Admittedly, this critique has made important contributions such as identifying and highlighting the built-in prejudices that Westerners have often expressed when studying or dealing with the Islamic world, and how the discourse of Western authors on the Islamic world has frequently served to establish Western cultural, political, economic, and military hegemony over that world, rather than being merely an example of detached intellectual inquiry. However, after the elapse of more than a quarter of a century since the rise of the academic critique of Orientalism, it is time to move on and to explore different methodological frameworks for understanding the development of the Islamic world during the modern period. Ironically, the critique of Orientalism inadvertently has served in the long run to solidify the Eurocentricism predominant in the study of the Islamic world, since it often presents the West as the points of reference and departure for such a critique. This critique is so concerned—often obsessively—with identifying and consequently denouncing how the West perceives and represents the Islamic world that it has become entangled in examining Western perceptions of the Islamic world instead of concentrating efforts on investigating the Islamic world itself.