One of his questions is prompted by a remark made by a visitor from the United States on the tourist trail of the city’s wonders after a conference that AlSayyad had organised some ten years ago in Cairo on ‘Manufacturing Heritage, Consuming Tradition’. On first seeing the Sphinx at Giza, the visitor exclaimed in disappointment, ‘Oh, it is small! Really small!’ Why did the Sphinx seem small to this visitor, AlSayyad wondered, and compared to what? It turned out that the participant was a lecturer from Las Vegas, who regularly parked his car opposite the Luxor Hotel and Casino, built in Las Vegas in 1993, and designed in the form of a gigantic pyramid, with a copy of the Sphinx, much bigger than the original, guarding the entry to the hotel. For this participant, the Las Vegas copy had become his frame of reference. Will Cairo in time transform itself (AlSayyad asks) to fulfil the dreams and images of such visitors?

Yet this process of transformation, as AlSayyad goes on to show, has been well under way for more than a century. For the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1892–93, the Hungarian architect Max Hertz, who had worked in Cairo since 1880, and who was in 1890 chief architect of the committee for the preservation of Arab monuments,had been commissioned to reconstruct an entire Cairene street with its various buildings, including the eighteenth-century fountain and elementary school (sabil-kuttab) of Abd-al-Rahman Katkuda. To ensure full authenticity, Hertz – in a curious move for a protector of Arab monuments – stripped windows and decorative tiles from the original building and shipped them to Chicago for his replica. Yet, as AlSayyad shows, Hertz’s drawings for the Chicago Exposition served, ‘in a twist of fate’, as the only record for the twentieth-century restoration of the original sabil-kuttab in Cairo, enabling the original to be reconstructed from the copy.

Recently, another, more extreme, architectural reversal has taken place. Instead of medieval dusty streets, bazaars, and Egyptian monuments being replicated for exhibitions, entire models of Western suburbia have been transplanted to the desert on the edge of Cairo near the pyramids of Giza. These replicas – bearing names such as Dreamland, Rehab, Hyde Park, and Beverley Hills – are another form of commercial enterprise intended not only for exhibition, but for sale. Dreamland was built in the 1990s by Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian developer and graduate of an American university, and offers Tuscan-type villas and luxury family units, complete with fibre-optic cable, a modern shopping mall, golf course, polo ground, and a theme park. Like other developments of this kind, Dreamland is a secure, gated settlement designed to appeal to middle-class locals seeking to buy their dream home in a modernist, Western-type development, where there are ‘No factories, no pollution, no problems’.

In Cairo itself, things are otherwise. By the end of the twentieth century, fifty per cent of the city consisted of districts made up of multi-storey, substandard urban structures – with no amenities, no water, no electricity – which came to be known euphemistically as ‘informal’ districts (ashwaiyyat), where the urban poor and lower middle classes lived. Because of the great number of these districts, Cairo itself has become known as the ‘informal’ city. While ‘informal’ districts have always been present to some degree, their spread was accelerated in recent decades by the economic policy of President Anwar Sadat (1970–81), designed to attract foreign capital and tourists at the expense of providing housing for a large sector of society. The further liberalisation of the economy under his successor, Osni Mubarak (1981–2011), and the processes of globalisation have further marginalised the urban poor. ‘In a globalizing era when cities no longer belong exclusively to their people,’ asks AlSayyad, will Cairo ‘continue to be the messy and difficult, but often vibrant and innovative city that its citizens will continue to shape through their actions or inactions?’

But this ‘informal’ city is just one of the many Cairos that Al Sayyad’s book examines. For visitors in earlier centuries, the city presented quite another face. For the philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun, arriving in Cairo in the last years of the Bahri Mamluks, in 1382, the city was ‘the metropolis of the universe, the garden of the world, the ant-hill of the human species … and lighted by the moons and stars of erudition’. Benoit de Maillet, the French consul in Egypt from 1692 to 1708, declared that the Gods had made Egypt a kind of paradise on earth, and that ‘the air was the purest in the world’. Likewise for the writer–draughtsman Vivant Denon, who accompanied Napoleon on his invasion of Egypt (1798–1801), Egypt was a quasi-earthly paradise. The pyramids of Giza were in his view ‘gigantic monuments that must be the last link between the colossi of art and those of nature’.

It was at the base of these pyramids that Auguste Mariette camped when he arrived in Cairo in 1850. Mariette was a Frenchman who had developed a passion for Egyptology, and dedicated his entire life to the study and protection of Egyptian antiquities. He excavated the site of Memphis, the first ancient capital city in Egypt. Here he found the mummy of Khaemwaset, a prince and son of Rameses II, and a high priest of the cult of Ptah in Memphis. Khaemwaset, who designed the burial ground (or serapeum) for the Bulls of Apis, was a dedicated historian of the necropolis of Saqqara, and had each tomb inscribed with the names of each dead ruler. AlSayyad considers these inscriptions to be the precursors of a system of classification used in modern museums. Mariette discovered that the study of Egyptology, so far from being a nineteenth-century invention, had existed during the reign of Rameses II, and that Khaemwaset had been known as the ‘Egyptologist Prince’.

The tradition to which Nezar AlSayyad himself belongs, of loving curatorship of the Egyptian past, is thus one of great antiquity. Yet the book is not merely a chronicle of times past: it is also alert to the social, economic, and political dilemmas facing Cairo today, and speculates provocatively about the city’s future.

CONTENTS: JULY–AUGUST 2011