By Mursi Saad El-Din Dr Caroline Williams is a real lover of Cairo. But to be more precise, her love is Islamic Cairo. Dr Williams first came to Cairo as a tourist. She was so impressed by the city and the country, she says, that she acquired a degree in Islamic studies from the University of Harvard. She then returned to Cairo in 1966 to study Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University. She has been returning to Cairo every summer on academic tours sponsored by the US Council on US-Arab Relations. Dr Williams has written books on Cairo, she has given talks and published articles. Her work is characterised by real love and affection for the city. She certainly knows her Cairo well. She believes that Cairo is a composite city, a composite of many spaces and times, such as, for example, Sayyeda Zeinab, Heliopolis, Mohandessin, Shoubra, Abbasiyya, Gamaliyya. The Cairo that most visitors see or explore is most often, she says, limited to the Western, colonial, business, financial, tourist, ministerial half of the city, which is centrally located along the banks of the Nile. But next to this Cairo, she writes, there is another Cairo, the Eastern, traditional, historic part of the city, which, apparently, is her favourite. This is an area which, except for forays to the bazaar, few of today's visitors know anything about. It is the area about which Dr Williams is worried and whose future is very much endangered and in doubt. Dr Williams describes the three main foci around which Cairo exists. The first is the mosque of Ahmed Ibn Tulun, built in 876. It is Cairo's third oldest Islamic monument and the best preserved example of an early congregational mosque. The second focus of mediaeval Cairo is Al-Qahira, founded by the Fatimid Dynasty to be their palace city. The third focus is the Citadel, the fortress stronghold established by Salaheddin, which rulers of Egypt from 1175-1874 made the seat of political, administrative and military power. Dr Williams is worried about this heritage, since it has been engulfed by another city, the modern megalopolis. She describes Cairo today as a global giant. With 15 million people in an area of about 400 square kilometres, it is the largest city in Africa. It is the cultural and intellectual centre of the Arab World. It is the principal social, educational, industrial, governmental centre of Egypt. But it has also been threatening the heritage she loves since 1967. Its way of life is changing. This is due to several factors. One is exploding population growth. The population of Cairo is almost triple what it was in 1967. Of Egypt's total population one in four lives in Cairo. Through natural increase and immigration from the countryside and other areas, the population increases by one third of a million a year. The resulting density of the area, in parts as high as 100,000 people per kilometre, generates an anthill effect that hurts the mediaeval city. It is interesting how the world gets worried about our own monuments, I do not want to say more than we do. When in 1979 a large number of the Islamic monuments were in a serious state of decay, the World Heritage Convention placed the old city of Cairo on its world heritage list. Thus Cairo keeps company with the main Pharaonic monuments and other culturally significant relics of the world such as the Taj Mahal and the city of Venice. In that year the Egyptian Antiquities Department asked UNESCO for assistance in creating an emergency conservation and rehabilitation plan. Architects, sociologists, planners and conservationists studied the situation. They concluded that the real quality of historic Cairo lay in the uniqueness of the ensemble of buildings and that any conservation strategy should include not only preservation of the individual monuments but also upgrading of the context in which they are located. Area conservation, that is the revitalisation of entire neighbourhoods, was seen as the only long term policy.
