At a jewellery store in the Khan Al-Khalili market in Cairo, Marianne is selecting a few silver gifts to take back to Australia for friends and family. She is on her first trip back to Egypt since leaving as a teenager in the early 1980s. She is not finding it easy, despite the help of a merchant who is happy to entertain a client visiting his shop in the otherwise deserted market. “How come you have so many Chinese and Turkish items?” Marianne asks the merchant. “I thought the Khan was about traditional Egyptian jewellery. I would have thought that the traditional jewellery and crafts would survive.” The chat between the middle-aged lady and the merchant revealed much about the declining share of Egyptian crafts in the small stores of Khan Al-Khalili. Along with the drop in shopping by foreign tourists, Egyptian clients prefer to invest in gold jewellery as it is a financial asset. There is declining interest, too, among the younger generation, who may not have the patience or skill to learn the craftsmanship required. The prices of raw materials and wages of the remaining skilled craftsmen have also risen. Not to mention that the Chinese have been dumping everything from Ramadan lanterns to miniature replicas of pharaonic figures to belly-dancing costumes and prayer mats on the Egyptian market. Finally, there is the sharp decline in tourism over the past four years. Marianne settled on a few silver bracelets and earrings and continued her shopping, hoping to find the traditional copper trays and teapots that an older neighbour had asked her to bring back. “It is very sad to see that the Khan has lost so much of its original or authentic character. But it seems it is due to economic pressures or the pressures of modernity,” she said. Marianne decided that a visit to a reputable traditional jewellery designer was a must for more special gifts. “I have a few addresses that will take me to boutiques in Garden City and Heliopolis, though I would rather have found things here at the Khan,” she said. Few remaining hubs: According to silversmith Mohamed Khalil, many of the items found in upmarket stores are either made or inspired by just a few craftsmen working in traditional jewellery-making quarters in Khan Al-Khalili, in the heart of Islamic Cairo, but also in silversmith and goldsmith hubs in the governorates of Sinai, Siwa, Aswan and Alexandria. Khalil's workshop is located in the heart of Khan Al-Khalili. He offers his dealers and the few select clients that he sells to a large variety of what he qualifies as “top copies of original items” collected from almost every governorate in the country. Khalil first visited these traditional hubs of jewellery making around the country in the 1970s. He wanted to improve the skills he had gathered at the workshops of an Armenian jewellery maker in downtown Cairo. At the time, he was both observing the workers and collecting items “that I wished to examine or rather study.” Khalil has now acquired superior craft skills and a high awareness of the diverse array of jewellery in copper, silver and gold. Dealers press him for items they want for their local and overseas stores. Prominent artists, whose photographs are displayed all around his small office, rely on him to find costumes for characters in TV and cinema productions. “It took a while to develop, because in the 1980s and 1990s these items did not catch the mood of shoppers. They were not looking for traditional items. This was not true of everyone, because of course some remained committed to traditional items, but it was largely true of the mass market and high-spending clients,” he said. Around the mid-1990s, Khalil decided to experiment with designs that combined a traditional motif — “the things we used to sell to tourists” — and more modern elements. Originally, they caught the interest of tourists but later they were also sold to some Egyptian clients. Around that time, Khalil said, prominent designer Azza Fahmi managed to create a new niche in the market when she selected traditional lines and skillfully incorporated them in designs that professional women would want to buy. Jeweller Khaled Nour agrees that today there is an established market for what he qualifies as “simple traditional items” — not just in jewellery but also in garments. Nour's small store at the entrance of Khan Al-Khalili sells to dedicated dealers and clients and provides a wide range of dresses and bags that are modern in design but traditional in ornamentation. He collects handmade knitted fabrics from Sinai and Siwa and other oases, and adds them to simple-looking long black dresses and large brown bags. Sally, a dealer who was selecting a few items for her Heliopolis-based store, said that when she first got a few items from Nour's store some five years ago she noticed that only “women with a very special taste” showed an interest in the items. Today, she said, things are changing, as women want the embroidered dresses and bags not just for a special Ramadan iftar or praying, but also for daily wear. “Several university students are now in the habit of wearing dresses with Sinai embroidery on the sleeves and of mixing them with a pair of silver Siwa-style earrings,” Sally said. The increase in the scope of the market is not very large, however, Sally and Nour agree, but it has nevertheless grown considerably. According to Nadia, a post-graduate student at Cairo University and one of Nour's regular customers, the fact that small stores like Nour's are operating side by side with the more chic and maybe more diverse or eclectic galleries of prominent ethnic garments collector-designer Shahira Mehrez is a sign that more women want to introduce traditional lines into their wardrobes. “I think if these items were more affordable and more accessible, the market would grow further,” she said. Preserving and reviving heritage: Zeinab Khalifa, a silver and gold jewellery designer and maker, is convinced that the “market will, or at least could, grow.” However, she would not immediately agree that it is possible to make these items more affordable or more accessible. “This is not the land of mass production, not if you are talking about highly authentic work that is truly handmade and not China-fabricated imitations,” Khalifa said. Having taken a journey of some 20 years from her daring but cautious introduction of Nubian-designed silver rings and earrings, Khalifa is now diversifying her collection of mostly silver jewellery with motifs not just from across the country's geographical space but also from its long history. Modern-style necklaces and bracelets in her collections use eclectic designs and motifs that range from the Pharaonic to the Coptic. “But this is not the kind of work that can be done overnight, and it is certainly the kind of work that requires particularly skilled and dedicated craftsmen whose wages cannot be small, not if you want a neat product that a modern woman could wear,” Khalifa argued. To expand the market, Khalifa said, more skilled craftsmen are needed and easier access to designs and skills from the few remaining and certainly dwindling masters of the craft across the country. “Already, there are items that are going from the rare to the extinct, and the good craftsmen are getting too old to continue for much longer,” Khalifa said. Expanding the trade, in terms of legal and tax regulations, is also difficult. “I think there are parallel tracks we need to work on if we wish to seriously help keep our heritage alive. We should be asking the state to assume its role of collecting and displaying rare items, and we should be asking it to consider specific trade regulations for those who work in the traditional crafts,” Khalifa suggested. Khalifa argued that there should be a serious space for learning “because, for example, you don't want to lose the knowledge about the differences between the kirddans (a strand necklace) that is ornamented at the centre with a different motif, depending on its place of fabrication, whether in Upper Egypt, the Delta, Cairo or Giza,” she said. For anthropologist Hagar Al-Hadidi, occupied in an endless pursuit of studying and collecting traditional Egyptian jewellery, much of this knowledge is “already gone, even from the local markets in the governorates around the country.” “I think we have to admit that we have already lost a good part of our collective heritage — not just in terms of jewellery, but also in terms of societal heritage. I don't think that many people today can clearly remember what their grandmothers used to wear in terms of jewellery,” said Al-Hadidi. “This goes especially for those living in Cairo who have been influenced by consecutive changes in taste and market trends, but it is also the case of those living in the Delta and Upper Egypt.” She argued that this is less the case in the still-traditional societies on the borders of the country, but there too there are changes that cannot be missed. The evolution of taste and trends, according to Al-Hadidi, is a function of socio-economic and political developments that all societies go through. “This is why the taste for and appreciation of silver jewellery in Egypt, in rural as well as urban areas, changed in favour of gold jewellery after World War I, and more so after World War II, as more people were inclined to feel that for strict economic reasons the possession of gold provided financial security more than the possession of silver or copper,” she said. The concept of jewellery as being part of economic status and security, Al-Hadidi says, has always been present. “Women would always wear jewellery to show off their charms as well as their socio-economic prominence, and with the change in the times what was considered prominent was changing,” she argued. The shift from copper and silver to gold did not immediately erode the functions of the jewellery or the traditional styles of their designs, however. “Women were shifting, for example, from the silver kirddan to the gold kirddan, but the same design was kept, at least in the early phases of the transformation,” she said. The big change came with the quest for modernity, when women from the privileged classes became interested in wearing watches and other items found only in the capital. “So, for example we were seeing the first designs of typical rural bracelets made of gold with a watch installed in their centre,” Al-Hadidi said. The more such modernity took over, the more the changes that were introduced into the lives of people, including their fashion choices. For example, with more girls going to school there was less demand for khoulkhal (anklets), and with more women finding jobs in urban areas, there was less demand for galabiyahs (traditional robes). “And as women were giving up the galabiyahs in favour of modern-style dress they were also abandoning the khoulkhal, no matter the metal they were made of, in favour of a necklace with a pendant and a watch or a ring,” Al-Hadidi said. Easier transportation and exposure to cinema productions set role models to be followed. Al-Hadidi added that with the migration of men to pursue jobs in the oil-rich Arab Gulf states in the 1970s and 1980s the taste of the market was influenced by the new and growing demand for Gulf-style yellow gold. This was an almost reverse of the trend for white gold and diamonds that the middle classes were about to catch from the upper classes, especially for wedding rings (shabkkah, which was used for almost all items of jewellery). For Al-Hadidi, the influence of consumerism cannot be overlooked, and consumerism means mass production. Fair trade and globalisation: “One cannot escape the call of modernity. We are no longer using the same cooking pots. We are now almost completely dependent on Teflon pans and not on the pottery cooking pots we had before. “It is becoming fashionable to have one or two pottery pots for Ramadan iftars, but you cannot expect anyone to switch from a microwave to a traditional oven or to a gasoline cooking stove,” said Abdel-Hayy Hassan, a seller of pottery pots and pans in Khan Al-Khalili. Hassan argues that the new demand for traditional pottery cooking pots is coming from new tastes. “People want pots that are more colourful, and they are also asking for specific patterns — for example, many of my clients ask for Tunisian-style pottery cooking pots, so I get friends who travel to Tunis to bring me some,” he says. He admits that his trade, of which he represents the fourth generation, has never been completely abandoned, but he says that this was the case for reasons other than traditional ones, “especially in Cairo and other big cities.” Anthropologist Reem Saad argues that while modernity has certainly had an influence in terms of the expansion of mechanisation and the electricity grid, there remains, at least in terms of some crafts, room for traditional settings. In rural Egypt, Saad says, mud-brick houses are being replaced by modern apartment buildings, but the traditional markets of the rural communities still display handmade objects, placed side by side with factory-produced and even imported objects. “At times, a merchant will be displaying handmade and factory-produced objects that serve the same function, or almost,” Saad said. “Pottery items are often displayed by traders who deal in other household goods as well.” According to Saad, the persistence of pottery making, especially in rural Upper Egypt, is perhaps the easiest to explain — certainly in the use of the zir and kullah (pots that cool the temperature of drinking water) — even though aluminum pots have taken over from the heavier pottery pots for women who still need to carry water from the Nile or from public water tubs to their houses. Saad adds that while most fields cannot do without the mechanised agriculture of today, but many small farmers still depend on agricultural items that are handmade. This is one reason why some traditional crafts persist. Another is the fact that these craftsmen own nothing but their craft: “They don't have land, and they are a marginalised group that has just a craft and so, therefore, they keep on producing.” Some of the traditional items being produced have dual uses, both functional and ritual, so if they lose one they probably keep the other, Saad explains. As well, some of the traditional products produced, especially by tribes on the borders in the south of the country, are exported to adjacent tribes in Sudan, she adds. Crafts can also serve as an art for the elite or as a form of charity from the rich to the poor. This is the story behind the Nagada garments store, founded when a group of intellectuals decided that the textile industry of a remote Upper Egyptian village in the governorate of Qena should be supported. They loved the village's traditional textile weaving, seeing it as a source of original Christmas gifts. “In this case, the traditional craft gained a new cultural significance,” Saad said. Akhmim, another Upper Egypt village in the governorate of Sohag, also benefited from this dual pursuit of encouraging development and seeking an identity signature for the country's cultural elite. Such experiences showcase the possible ways that the traditional can stand up to the takeover of contemporary mass culture. According to Mona Al-Sayed, executive director of Fair Trade Egypt, it is this dual purpose of identity signature and development that can harness globalisation in favour of ethnic goods. This is the story of a project that Al-Sayed has been presiding over for the last decade. “Because craftsmen are often marginalised, they are mostly without the required trade skills, and therefore they are often almost abused by traders,” Al-Sayed explained. “When the project started in the late 1980s it focused on helping craftsmen keep up their work, but it did not have a feasible and sustainable marketing strategy. “As a result, it almost closed but was saved by the creation of a successful marketing organisation that granted the craftsmen a fair share of the revenues of their hand-made products while promoting these products at both the local and international levels.” She continued, “Our mission evolved from just the preservation of the crafts to the empowerment of the craftsmen and craftswomen.” The project involved workers on the borders, in the Delta, Upper Egypt and Cairo. Such empowerment is now opening the door to new generations to learn the crafts of their parents and grandparents, once looked down upon as socially demeaning or financially unrewarding. Having joined the Netherlands-based World Fair Trade Organisation, Al-Sayed said, Fair Trade Egypt has been able to find the strength to expand the scope of its operations to what is now well over 1,000 artisans and to a much more diverse selection of crafts than what the group originally started with. “The slowdown in the economy has shrunk the local market, but we are currently focused on widening our international exhibitions to keep the groups of craftsmen who have been working with us going,” Al-Sayed explained. She gives the example of Rawiyah, a pottery maker from Fayoum, who has gained economic security and social status through her work and without it would be jobless, and Ishak, who paid off his debts and created a profitable jewellery-making business. Without this, he would have had to sell his workshop and sack the young men and women he had trained to help him produce more. “Succumbing to the influence of a slowing economy is a huge mistake. Doing this would kill some of the businesses and erode some of the crafts. Instead, we go on the offensive and upgrade the skills of our artisans and try to pursue more markets overseas and knock at more doors at home,” Al-Sayed said. She is determined to use the tools of globalisation, especially information technology, to help create new markets that will at least keep the businesses, crafts and artisans afloat. According to Saad, this is precisely how philanthropy can help folk crafts survive and ultimately support cultural identity and modern forms of nationalism.
