When the 25 January Revolution broke out in 2011, toppling former president Hosni Mubarak and his dictatorial regime, Egyptians expected that the country would soon advance to a better situation. However, the opposite has unfortunately been the case in some areas, notably with regard to the country's heritage. Many Pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic archaeological sites have been subjected to looting or destruction due to the lack of security that overwhelmed the country after the revolution. Among these sites was Al-Muizz Li-Din Allah Street in Islamic Cairo and its monumental Islamic edifices. The iron gates imported from Italy to close the street and turn it into a pedestrian zone during the daytime were broken by vandals. The zone had originally been planned to help visitors to the area enjoy the magnificent Islamic monuments in their original environment and experience the traditions and customs of those who had lived during the various periods of the Islamic era. However, since then peddlers, fruit vendors and grocers have all moved in to sell their goods in the street, sometimes on the monuments themselves. Some of them have erected ugly wooden kiosks to sell sweets and cigarettes. The street is being used as a shortcut for vehicles, and the open courtyards of the Fatimid and Ottoman mosques have been turned into parking lots. The open court in front of the Ibn Barquq Mosque, for example, a monument in the protected zone, has been transformed into a folkloric food court, where wooden handcarts laden with koshari (a rice and macaroni dish), liver, brains and hummus serve pedestrians and workers in the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, the empty space between the Beit Al-Suheimi, one of the area's most beautiful and important ancient houses, and the house next door is now an oriental coffee shop with a dozen small tables. The area in front of Al-Hakim Mosque has been converted into an olive market in the morning and a coffee shop at night. At one corner there is a pool table where games take place. Some of billboards in the street, which were supposed to be in harmony with its historical atmosphere, have also been changed into ugly new ones. “Such examples are not the only cases of the abuses that have been going on,” said Mohamed Abdel-Aziz, director of the Historic Cairo Rehabilitation Project. Abdel-Aziz said that vandals had damaged a large part of the granite used for the street's pavements and plant basins. The billboards and information boards had been stolen, as had the lamps and rubbish bins. The walls of shops, residential houses and some edifices in the street had been turned into elections boards for political slogans or advertisements, while other areas had been used to dump garbage. “The street has been in a real mess,” Abdel-Aziz told Al-Ahram Weekly, pointing out that most of the work carried out during the past 10 years to make the street into an open-air museum of Islamic art has now been ruined. “The atmosphere in the street has changed for the worse,” Mustafa Alewa, a bazaar owner in Al-Muizz Street, told the Weekly. He said that the vibration from passing vehicles posed a huge threat to the monuments and he also complained about the constant noise of car horns. Ratiba Abbas, the owner of a shop in the neighbouring lemon market area, told the Weekly that the street has been turned into a garbage dump. There was so much rubbish around, she said, that a stray cigarette end could easily cause a conflagration. She called on the police to take the necessary security measures in order to encourage tourists to come back to Egypt. However, Abdel-Aziz said that efforts were continuing to restore the street despite the present difficulties. Garbage removal was on-going, he said, and some of the information panels had been re-installed. Damaged granite tiles would be replaced with new ones, and the graffiti that had appeared on the walls would be removed. In collaboration with the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs and two NGOs, Creating Life and The Message, the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) had been cleaning the street and removing the rubbish as part of a Cleaning Al-Muizz Street Campaign, Abdel-Aziz said. The ministry had provided the necessary equipment, and the clean-up was on-going, often carried out by youthful volunteers. However, despite such efforts, the encroachments were continuing and were spreading throughout the area. In order to help control the situation, Minister of State for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim and Cairo Governor Galal Al-Said embarked on a tour earlier this week to understand the situation better. During the tour, Ibrahim said that the MSA would continue its work to restore the street to how it had looked before the 25 January Revolution. Working with the Cairo governorate, his ministry had commissioned new gates for the area, and these would be installed soon, he said. All the information panels would be re-installed, and security kiosks would be erected at several points along the street. A permanent police unit to control the entry of cars and other vehicles into the street would be present, Ibrahim said, and security would be tightened in front of every monument in the street, as well as at its gates, in order to prevent any violation or encroachment on the street and its monuments. Ibrahim also said that the ministry would sign a protocol of understanding with the Ministry of Construction in order to continue the restoration of other monuments along the street and on Cairo's northern walls. The project would include resuming excavation work on the walls' southern side and the restoration and rehabilitation of the Qayt Bey Wekala at Bab Al-Nasr with a view to transforming it into a hotel. Al-Said said that all encroachments on the monuments would be removed, and the new billboards erected by the shop owners would be taken down and replaced with new ones similar to those that had previously been erected. He added that the governorate would spare no efforts in restoring the street to its previous condition.
