In his late 60s, Salama Hanafi, and Atef Hanafi, in his late 30s, are sitting opposite each other in a small but tidy workshop in the heart of Nour Al-Zallam (light in the dark) alley in the popular Cairo district of Sayeda Zeinab. Salama is fixing bits of coloured glass onto tin sheets that have already been slashed and pierced by his son Atef. In a quarter of an hour, a half-metre Ramadan lantern has been put together and is ready to be joined by more as the two men work 16-hour days to make the lanterns in the run-up to the holy month of Ramadan. “It is only the large sizes of lanterns that we work on during the last few weeks ahead of Ramadan. The small sizes that people buy for their children are already made seven months ahead of Ramadan because they take more time to put together,” Salama said. He is one of the oldest Ramadan lantern-makers in this small street, which he suggests takes its name from its association with the lantern workshops. Ramadan When he started his career as an apprentice in the early 1950s “just before the July Revolution”, there were “seven workshops making lanterns in this street alone, being those that provided wholesalers and retailers with lanterns not just in Cairo but all over the country,” Salama said. At that time the process of assembling a lantern was a lot more primitive and took more time as the craftsmen had a lot more work to do to prepare the glass and the tin. “You had to collect old broken glass and empty tin boxes from all over the place to prepare the material, and we had to do the entire preparation process ourselves. Now we get the tin and coloured glass from factories, and we only have to cut and assemble it,” he said. According to Atef Hanafi, there is an extra bit of work at times, however. “We have patterns stamped on the glass of some of the lanterns because unlike a few decades ago they are no longer a simple gift for children to carry around after the end of the fast. Now they have become decorative items in their own right,” he says. There are many stories about how the first Ramadan lantern came into use, all involving the celebration of the advent of Ramadan during the rule of the Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt in the 10th century that also introduced other festive elements to the holy month. According to the workers making the lanterns or the sellers in nearby Taht Al-Rabae Street, the past 50 years have seen many developments in the Ramadan lanterns, however. According to Abdallah Hashim who has been selling lanterns for the past half century, the traditional lanterns that had a candle inside and used to be carried around by children went out of fashion in the 1970s. “They first went out of fashion in well-off neighbourhoods in the 1960s, and then slowly but surely it became unusual to see children going around carrying the lanterns even in the popular neighbourhoods. You could say that they began to be considered a thing of the past or for the poor,” he said. Ramadan In the early 1980s, as a result of the so-called Open Door policy introduced in the 1970s by former president Anwar Al-Sadat there was a taste for importing “what we called back then modern lanterns that were not made of tin and not lit with candles but were made of plastic and lit with a light from a battery. This kind of lantern became fashionable, but only briefly, as what kids really wanted to do after the end of the fast was to watch TV,” Hashim said. He added that during the second half of the 1980s and throughout the best part of the 1990s the business of making lanterns was slowing down. Hanafi agreed. “Skilled artisans began finding themselves out of business at that point,” he said. However, in the second half of the 1990s, people started to try to recapture the traditional Ramadan mood. “Ramadan has a special flavour, a special colour, and a special mood, and people began missing this mood that was disappearing in favour of Ramadan TV dramas,” Hashim said. He noticed that at the same time many Egyptians were coming back from the Arab Gulf countries where they had worked for many years. “They were not coming back to the same popular neighbourhoods they had lived in before, but to more economically upscale neighbourhoods, so they felt they wanted to bring the Ramadan of their childhoods back to their homes and started to reintroduce the lanterns as decorative items,” Hashim said. To serve such purposes, the lantern-makers had to resume their cutting and sealing processes because the plastic lanterns then on the market were not considered desirable. It was time for bigger lanterns made of tin and coloured glass but lit with lamps using electric current. Ramadn With the change in social norms that used to make it difficult for people to have Iftar, one of the Ramadan meals, outside their homes and the introduction of Iftar and Sohour buffets in restaurants, there was a new demand for Ramadan ornaments, top among them the lanterns that began to be made two or even three metres high. According to Hashim, this almost closed the door on Chinese-made imported lanterns. “There was still room to import very small lanterns that people would buy as decorative items, but even then we asked our artisans to produce very small sizes, and these are now slowly replacing the imported ones,” Hashim said. Today, shoppers can find many shapes and sizes of traditional lanterns, some wooden-crafted made in workshops in Mansoura or Damietta, some iron ones that are mostly imported, and some made of beads by women wishing to generate extra incomes. The most fashionable type over the last three years has been one in which the glass has been replaced with Islamic patterned fabric (khayamiya), originally used to create shaded open spaces. According to Omar Al-Abyad, another merchant, these come in different styles. “Some are made in simple fashion with material that is printed in one pattern of blue and red or green and blue, while others are made of more carefully printed material that comes in a diversity of designs and colours. The price varies according to the style,” he said. Hassan Kamel, a khayamiya maker, said that “only very few use hand-made khayamiya material because this is a lot more expensive. The overwhelming majority are made of mass-produced printed textiles,” he said. According to Hashim, the lanterns that are made of hand-crafted textiles are usually made for export and not for local use. “Already the basic material is getting a lot more expensive, and we are seeing a considerable decline in sales this year —I guess by around 30 per cent while the increase in prices is around 40 to 50 per cent,” he said. It is mostly the export market that Hashim and others now count on, and it is mostly this market that keeps the workshops of the Hanafis operating and apprenticing new labour. According to Mamdouh Sakr, director of the Art Jameel Project which offers two-year training for talented men and women who wish to learn traditional crafts, if the prices of the lanterns were to get out of reach, they would simply become museum items. “The Ramadan lantern is one of the best of the surviving crafts. One reason for this is that it has managed to stay affordable, and another is that its uses are not constrained by the original purposes for which it was made,” Sakr said. The lanterns and khayamiya, Sakr added, are both “modernised crafts”. “If all the khayamiya material were to be strictly hand-made, the business would have scaled down significantly. It is mass production that has kept it going, even if not as skilfully,” Sakr said. The lanterns are perhaps the most celebrated of all the traditional Islamic crafts still practiced today. “In a sense the lanterns have all the ingredients of the crafts related to the Islamic era: colours, basic materials, no complicated drawings, and light,” he argued. At one of the Art Jameel classes 10km from Nour Al-Zallam Alley, Farah Al-Masri is learning how to use copper and geometrical designs to create modern Islamic-inspired crafts. “There is a lot of interest today in old-fashioned crafts that come in more modern forms for decorative purposes,” Al-Masri said. “There are many galleries selling these items, including some very nicely made and almost hand-crafted lanterns that are sold at high prices as art pieces,” she added. Sakr agreed that there was a growing market for upscale copies of Islamic art motifs. “It is the talented and well-trained designers who will be able to work alongside the older craftsmen to keep the traditions going,” he said.
