Creating Medieval Cairo

Empire, Religion, and Architectural Preservation in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Paula Sanders

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781617972300
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architekturgeschichte

This book argues that the historic city we know as Medieval Cairo was created in the nineteenth century by both Egyptians and Europeans against a background of four overlapping political and cultural contexts: the local Egyptian, Anglo-Egyptian, Anglo-Indian, and Ottoman imperial milieux. Addressing the interrelated topics of empire, local history, religion, and transnational heritage, historian Paula Sanders shows how Cairo's architectural heritage became canonized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The book also explains why and how the city assumed its characteristically Mamluk appearance and situates the activities of the European-dominated architectural preservation committee (known as the Comité) within the history of religious life in nineteenth-century Cairo. Offering fresh perspectives and keen historical analysis, this volume examines the unacknowledged colonial legacy that continues to inform the practice of and debates over preservation in Cairo.

Constructing Medieval Cairo in the Nineteenth Century

Egypt in the nineteenth century stood at the crossroads of two great empires, the British and the Ottoman, and it also had a long history of indigenous architectural and cultural practices. I argue below that these varied parts came together under the Comité to produce a version of the city that was canonized as authentically medieval, and look at how all the elements of these overlapping imperial spheres came together in the late nineteenth century to produce what came to be referred to as Medieval Cairo.

This chapter is made up of two large sections. In the first, I show how the idea of preserving Arab art emerged from a number of different impulses and practices, both European and Egyptian. These different impulses and settings were superimposed upon one another, and so it is not always easy to disentangle them. For the sake of clarity, however, I treat British imperial and Ottoman Egyptian practices separately. Next I show how the medieval in Cairo came to be identified so closely with Mamluk architecture. Just as Donald Reid reminds us that it is preservation, and not neglect, that calls for explanation, I argue that the strongly Mamluk character of Medieval Cairo requires investigation and explanation. Understanding how Medieval Cairo was constructed as an essentially Mamluk city allows me to address the issue I raise in the second section: the different meanings that this ‘medieval’ city had when it was in the process of being constructed and canonized. The second section of this chapter, then, discusses why and how Medieval Cairo could signify so many different things to so many different people.

Creating a Mamluk Medieval in Cairo

Architectural Preservation as Imperial Practice: The Archaeological Survey of India

The British had been in India for nearly a century before the government assumed responsibility for recording and preserving its antiquities. In January 1862, the Governor General lamented “the neglect with which the greater portion of the architectural remains, and of the traces of by-gone civilization have been treated, though many of these . . . are full of beauty and interest.” He hastened to add that he did not mean by “neglect” the failure to restore or preserve them, a task which was beyond the resources of the government. He meant, rather, the duty “of investigating and placing on record, for the instruction of future generations, many particulars that might still be rescued from oblivion, and throw light upon the early history of England’s great dependency; a history which, as time moves on, as the country becomes more easily accessible, and traversable, and as Englishmen are led to give more thought to India than such as barely suffices to hold it and govern it, will assuredly occupy, more and more, the attention of the intelligent and enquiring classes in European countries.”¹

The motivation for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was not knowledge of India’s antiquities for their own sake, but rather the duty to place them on record, as described by the Governor General, for the instruction of future generations—not future Indian generations, but future British generations.² The Archaeological Survey was placed under the direction of Major Alexander Cunningham, who honored the charge to search for remains of great antiquity or historical interest by following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Huen Tsiang. His quest took him to places that claimed the attention of a British public fascinated by the search for origins and convinced that these sites represented the high point of ancient India’s civilization.³ The survey was, as Thomas Metcalf argues, part of the colonial administration’s “larger project of defining the enduring elements of India’s society . . . to order its past, and its present.” As Metcalf further notes, “The British were determined not only to recover India’s past, as part of the larger Victorian fascination with the ancient world, but to order this past into a coherent narrative that extended up to the present. In so doing, the British could, or so they imagined, create a secure and usable past in India for themselves.”⁴

Conservation was not initially part of the Archaeological Survey’s charge, although two years later the Survey was empowered to “prevent injury and preserve buildings remarkable for their antiquity, or for their historical and architectural value.”⁵ Motivated by concerns over the pilfering of objects from architectural sites,⁶ British officials proposed the creation of a central department that would preserve antiquities in their original context. The Survey was suspended in 1865 and reestablished in 1871, this time with “professedly scientific objectives.”⁷ Now, Cunningham was to undertake a systematic survey of the entire country and describe “all architectural and other remains that are remarkable either for their antiquity, or their beauty, or their historical interest.”⁸ These decayed monuments called out for Britain’s protection and “testified to Britain’s self-proclaimed role as guardian of India’s past.”⁹ Britain’s role as guardian of India’s past, sovereign of India’s present, and shaper of her future was expressed not only in archaeological and conservation activities, but also in the development of Indo-Saracenic forms for British imperial architecture in India.¹⁰ The Archaeological Survey and Anglo-Indian administrators saw in Muslim architecture the remnants of the Muslims as an invading force, a foreign presence that prefigured their own conquest and their role as both guardians of the past (a past largely of their own invention) and agents of change.¹¹

Classifying and recording India’s architecture was a primary element in the production of knowledge about India’s past. Architecture, it was believed, provided the most reliable data about India’s history, its religions and social groups, and the relations among its various communities.¹² In order to read these buildings properly, it was necessary to ascertain the Original context’ of monuments, a kind of inquiry that went hand-in-hand with the work of oriental philologists, who were constructing (in their view, reconstructing) from texts a systematic knowledge of India’s past. In his opening address to the Aryan section of the Second International Congress of Orientalists (London, 1874), Professor Max Müller insisted that it was the orientalists who were restoring corrupted versions of religion to their pure forms. He praised the Indian government for its “readiness” to assist “every enterprise tending to throw light on the literature, the religion, the laws and customs, the arts and manufactures of that ancient Oriental Empire . . . . There are two surveys carried on at the present moment in India, a Literary and an Archaeological Survey.”¹³ Müller’s point was a simple, but important, one. The work of the Literary Survey and the publication of ancient texts was revealing to natives the “folly of their way.” He asserted triumphally, “Thus the religion, the literature, the whole character of the people of India is becoming more and more Indo-European,” and congratulated his fellow orientalists on “the new life which we have imparted to their ancient history.”¹⁴

The work of orientalists and archaeologists gained increasing importance under Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1898-1905, who was tireless in his attention to the conservation of India’s architectural heritage.¹⁵ Under his watchful eye, monuments were returned to their “original function,” but it was the British who determined what that would be. If it were to be religious worship, the history of the site as told by orientalists, not its current ritual use by natives, would determine what was appropriate. Not surprisingly, the British frequently found themselves at odds with the local population over the question of the appropriate use for a given site. Although the government often deferred to the locals in order to avoid open conflict, the British clearly believed that original (as determined by the British) practice was authentic and ought to carry the day.¹⁶ Whenever possible, however, they resisted acknowledging the legitimacy of contemporary local religious traditions, a fact that clearly played a part—as we shall see in Chapter 2—in the Comité’s understanding of Mamluk architecture as the authentic representation of Islam.

Preserving Arab Art in Cairo as an Adjunct to British Imperialism in India

European interest in preserving Arab art arose out of more than one source. As Ussama Makdisi has discussed, two different phases of European romanticism generated the desire to preserve pre-modernities in the Orient: one sought to preserve a premodern East as a response to European modernization and its attendant traumas; the other sought to preserve a premodern East in response to an independent Ottoman modernization.¹⁷ ‘Arab art’ in the sense of architecture had been introduced to the literate European public from the 1830s to the 1870s through the works of Pascal Coste, Jules Bourgoin, Prisse d’Avennes, and Owen Jones.¹⁸ These artists, architects, and draftsmen reveled in the beauty of Arab art, though their high opinion was not shared by all. Some observers deemed the architecture “ornamental enough . . . yet . . . coarsely so.”¹⁹ The mid-century judgment of Richard Francis Burton offers not only a critique, but a diagnosis of the origins of the ills of Saracenic architecture: it is a “plagiarism from the Byzantine, and it was reiterated in the Gothic . . . ,” the result of what he called an “architectural lawlessness” and “disregard for symmetry” that he attributed to “an imperfect ‘amalgamation and enrichment.’” On the whole, however, European travelers were admiring of Arab art, and they began to show interest in preserving its artifacts during the heydey of European preservationism, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The first suggestion that Arab art (in the sense of artifacts) should be preserved had come in 1869, when two European architects in the department of pious endowments (awqaf), Auguste Salzmann and Julius Franz, suggested to Khedive Ismail that he establish a museum for objects of Arab art in the mosque of al-Zahir Baybars, north of the walls of what is today referred to as Fatimid Cairo.²⁰ Ismail did, in fact, issue such a decree, but nothing was done and little discussion of Arab art seems to have taken place until several years later, when the British Consul at Cairo, E.T Rogers, added his voice to the chorus. He did not make his case directly to the khedive, but put forward a motion before the Archaeological Section at the Second International Congress of Orientalists (1874) calling for the establishment of a committee “for the preservation and restoration of monuments of Oriental art and architecture, and for duly recording” those monuments which are decaying and which cannot be restored.”²¹

This is the same meeting at which Professor Max Müller had opened the Aryan section with his encomium to the Literary and Archaeological Surveys in India. By 1874, when the International Congress was held, the Archaeological Survey of India was well underway. Staffed by experts who had already completed a significant portion of the business of recording, describing, classifying, and documenting the vast architectural heritage (Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim) of India, the ASI was by then an official instrument of the Indian government. The suggestion at this same meeting by the British consul that a similar program be put into place in Egypt was no coincidence.

Stanley Lane-Poole’s account of the motion brought before the Archaeological Section, and his analysis of the problem, make the connection between India and Egypt explicit: “The system and growth of Arab architecture, the art in which the Arabs achieved most success, are subjects with regard to which we are utterly in the dark. And our ignorance is most complete where our knowledge should begin; we do indeed know something, just a little, about Indian and Mor...