Paula Sanders’ “Creating Medieval Cairo is not a quick read for an average tourist, but a book for the more serious observers and students. It is a meticulously researched book with more than 50 pages of notes and bibliography at the back to prove it.
Paula Sanders is herself an academic; she is the dean of graduate and post doctoral studies and associate professor of history at Rice University.
Sanders has already published one book and several articles on the history of Cairo and allied subjects.
Hitherto it has been generally accepted that the conservation of Cairo began as the answer to the need for rescuing Cairo’s dilapidated Arab architecture in the middle of the 19th century. For this reason, the Comite de Conservation des Monuments de l’Arte Arabe, founded in1881 by Khedive Tawfiq, was commissioned and charged with the task of preserving Islamic monuments in Egypt.
Paula Sanders reframes this story of conservation and allows for a new understanding of Medieval Cairo as a creation of the 19th century.
She goes on to look at “The Arabian Nights and “Medieval Cairo in relation to each other and shows us how they were produced and regarded by readers, viewers and restorers. She maintained that these two were themselves a mixture of old and new and provides evidence to this effect.
Later she discusses “Keeping Cairo Medieval: World Heritage and the Debate over Fatimid Monuments. Here she analyzes the heated controversy over the Bohra restorations in 969-1171 that clashed with the World Heritage ideas of preservation.
She presents the reader with a marvellous collection of 36 photographs.
Some figure the “before and “after restoration of particular mosques and others, like the Mahmal procession in the early 1900s, exhibits a wonderful piece of religious history as well as a glimpse of life and conditions then.
So do figures 12 (“A Storyteller ) and 13 (“The Souk El Nahasin ). The photo of the bricked in arcades forming dwellings in the Ibn Tulun Mosque courtyard, round about 1870, prompts the reader to ponder some of the hardships and discomforts caused by restoration.
I must admit that the academic language took a bit of unravelling, but perhaps the failure was on my part and not Paula Sanders’. “Creating Medieval Cairo is not a book you read from cover to cover. A wealth of information is packed into this monumental publication, so it is better to take it in small bites.
Creating Medieval Cairo:
Empire, Religion and Architectural Preservation in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
AUC Press, 2008
