Gamal Essam El-Din reviews the history of the parliamentary building destroyed last week by fire On 19 August the 19th century home of the Shura Council, Egypt's upper house consultative parliament, went up in flames. It is not the first Cairo landmark to be destroyed by fire. On 16 January 1952, in a precursor to the 23 July coup of the same year, much of Downtown Cairo succumbed to flames, including the celebrated Shephard Hotel. Then, on 28 October 1971, Cairo's first opera house fell victim. After eight hours the building, commissioned as part of the Khedive Ismail's extravagant celebrations to mark the opening of the Suez Canal and for which Verdi wrote Aida, was no more than a smouldering wreck. Much of the Shura Council building, like the opera house, dated from the rule of Ismail (1863-1879), whose great ambition was to turn Cairo into the Paris of the Orient. The building was initially constructed in 1850 to serve as a palace for Ismail El-Mofatish, the man the Khedive Abbas entrusted with modernising Egypt's irrigation system. El-Mofatish became a close associate of Ismail when the latter came to power in 1863, though later they would quarrel. El-Mofatish was assassinated in 1878 after which his palace became the Ministry of Irrigation. In its early days, says Deputy Irrigation Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalabi, the first floor of the ministry housed archives, the second the offices of the minister, his deputies and aides while the third contained the departments of electricity, mechanics, public works and dams and barrages. When Khedive Ismail decided to launch Egypt's first Western-style parliament, a new building was annexed to the Irrigation Ministry to serve as the birthplace of the Middle East's first parliament. Maglis Shura Al-Qawaneen (The Consultative Council of Laws) was part of Ismail's strategy to modernise Egypt. The Maglis opened in 1866 and served as Egypt's parliament until 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. When, with the liberal constitution of 1922, Egypt adopted a bicameral system a third building was required to accommodate what came to be called the House of Representatives -- now known as Maglis Al-Shaab (The People's Assembly). By 1924, then, Egypt had two houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. It was the latter that occupied Khedive Ismail's Maglis Shura Al-Qawaneen while the former was housed in a new building with a landmark Islamic dome. Following the 1952 Revolution the Senate was scrapped while the House of Representatives was renamed Maglis Al-Umma. The Senate's meeting hall which opened in 1886 was then closed until 1981 when President Anwar El-Sadat decided to revert to a two-house system. Sadat decided to establish what is now the Shura Council and ordered that the old hall of the Senate accommodate its activities. When, in 1990, the Irrigation Ministry was relocated to a new building on the banks of the Nile in Giza its old downtown headquarters was taken over by the Shura Council and the People's Assembly. The third floor was occupied by nine People's Assembly Committees while the second floor accommodated Shura Council committees, a media centre, the so-called Mubarak Hall and a museum chronicling the history of parliamentary life. Eighty per cent of the third floor of the Irrigation Building has now been destroyed, 70 per cent of the second floor left in ruins and just under half of the first. Safwat El-Sherif, chairman of Shura Council and secretary-general of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), has announced that the hall of the Shura Council, opened in 1924, escaped the worst of the damage and that restoration work would begin with its refurbishment. It is expected to be complete for the new parliamentary session in November. People's Assembly speaker Fathi Sorour has confirmed that all the assembly committee rooms on the third floor have been destroyed. He breathed a sigh of relief, however, when he discovered that the Pharaonic Hall of the Assembly, a restroom containing many momentos of Egypt's parliamentary history, had escaped unscathed.
