ISLAMIC CAIRO, PART II

Pre-script: There is Israeli music playing in Costa Coffee right now. I am thoroughly weirded-out.

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I’m not going to lie, today paled in comparison to yesterday’s adventures. At least we ended up at Khan el-Khalili…

We stopped for tea just outside of the Mosque of Hussein (Mohammad’s grandson), where an 11th-century shrine apparently holds the head of its namesake. How is this unlike the possession of saints’ relics?

Some of the most interesting information I gathered today concerns the Shi’ite Fatimid dynasty. Apparently, the Fatimids fancied themselves living representations of God on earth. It was the long period between the original dispute between Sunnis and Shi’ites that led to the development of complex Shi’ite codes and justifications for their right to rule the Muslim world, and ultimately the growing differences between the sects. The Fatimids made Egypt a great trade emporium, but they only stayed in power for the last century of their rule because of the threat from Crusader Christians in 1099. Their demise came in 1171, when they were overthrown by Salahaddin Ayuubi and the Sunnis.

I also learned that the Mamlouk system of power inheritance was unlike any other I’ve heard of: in order to be a ruler, one had to be a slave. This system weeds out poverty, and institutes social stability through control of state and personal wealth. Ingenious!

(Right about this time, Page picked up another cat. It gravitated towards Todd and stuck around until we left the coffee shop. Did you know that Mohammad had a preference for cats over dogs? I promise it’s true. William told us.)

We spent the morning walking down Bayn al-Qasrayn, the Medieval main street that used to separate the Eastern and Western Palaces of the Fatimids. William explained that the Fatimids constructed a parade ground near the palaces, because they liked to throw parties. A very pagan-sounding festival involving the blessing of the Nile-o-meter to ensure a flood was celebrated here, as was the ancient Egyptian New Year’s festival. Were the later inhabitants of Egypt clinging to the history of the people who came before them out of legitimacy? Did they want to say, “those people who built the pyramids, they are our ancestors”?

The whole area around Bayn al-Qasrayn is in the process of a transformation into a tourist zone, so a lot of places were closed. Still, we were pretty fortunate considering. Our first stop was the gate of the original Khan al-Khalili, a caravansenai or wholesale market and merchants’ hotel where wares from Iran were the most common to be sold.

We then stopped in front of the Madrassa of Sultan Salah Ayuub, which served as a courthouse, four schools of Islamic law and a madrassa, in addition to being a house of prayer. The facade is really great, with lovely carved stone detail. It was decorated because it faced the street of an open square; inside, however, the structures are oriented towards Mecca, which make their walls run oblique to the outer walls of the madrassa. Around the back of the madrassa is a classical column abandoned in the center of a trash heap.

Next, we stopped in front of “the Mausoleum of As-Saleh Nagm Ad-din Ayuub,” which sounds an awful lot like Sultan Salah Ayuub. The mausoleum was the first tomb to be added to a religious building in Cairo, and set the precedent for every mosque built afterwards.

Across the street is the Complex of Sultan Qalawoon, the father of Nasser Mohammad (of the El-Nasser Mosque). At one time, the complex enclosed a madrassa, tomb and public hospital. Its facade is adorned with interlocking black and white marble blocks, and its windows are surrounded by recessed, covered arches, which look quite Crusader-Gothic (except for the window grills and continuous inscription band, the whole front looks this way). William suggested that this might be because imprisoned Crusaders are said to have been its builders. In fact, the inner structure of the madrassa closely resembles that of a basilica.

Around the building is a fountain surrounded by columns. It sort of looks like a moat, and (because of its bottom) can give you a feel for the street level at the time of construction. We were allowed inside the complex, which has one of the most elaborate painted and carved ceilings we’ve seen. Unfortunately, my camera doesn’t do such a good job when I can’t use the flash…

Next door is a mosque erected by Nasser (right next to Daddy). The facade is a straight dichotomy of victory and failure, as William put it: the front door comes from a church in Acre, but the minaret is constructed in the Andalusian style. Inside, the structure has the same long-vaulted wooden ceiling as Daddy’s mosque. It also has a lovely mikrab decorated with multiple layers of imprinted stucco in the Iranian style. (I feel like I’m really starting to become familiar with the elements of a mosque. It feels good.) The restoration is… eh. It was done by a German team, and the Germans are apparently into not using any of the original materials when rebuilding. Here it was done to look like it had just fallen apart, with crumbled half-walls of brand-new baked brick. Strange.

Across the street from the mosque another combination elementary-school-and-public-water-dispensary, and there’s also one down the street. We entered the second one, which is covered with the same generic blue and white painted tiles one can buy in the market. These were popular during the Ottoman Period, according to William. The upper floor had some great classical columns and offered a nice view of the street, all the way to the tower of the first madrassa we visited.

Oh, and the building smelled like roasted marshmallows.

Last, we visited the Akmar Mosque. It was the first mosque in Cairo to have a fully-dressed stone facade, and the first to use continuous inscription bands on the street side. Some of the inscriptions are actually political, stating the glory of the builder, et cetera, et cetera. That’s a pretty interesting mix of religion and personal prestige, if you ask me.

The mosque was renovated during the 1980s by a group of Indian Shi’ites on a mission to restore (read: make gaudier, and not in the original style) old Shi’ite structures. Today the walls are painted a pale yellow, which (to the Indians’ credit) actually adds a nice, light feeling to the open-air inner court. White arch covers and window grills sit where some of the old grey ones were lost. The mikrab is made of marble, which wasn’t used on mikrabs until after the time of the building’s original construction (a fatal flaw!).

William led us to the end of this section of Islamic Cairo, where we could see the old Fatimid city walls. Then we turned around and went straight to Khan el-Kalili to buy some kitsch.

(THE MOSQUES OF) ISLAMIC CAIRO, PART I

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I just realized that a great New York Times article I have linked on the side mentions most of the sites we saw today (and some from the other day)!

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I put on my nicest set of modest clothes for our trip to the northern part of El Fustat this morning. We visited four mosques, two of which are inside the citadel, and an Ottoman house museum. Strictly because of my interests, I’m going to keep the focus of my thoughts on the museum, to which I’ve devoted an entire entry.

But first…

The Mosque of Ibn Talun is a large open space with pointed arches with swirling patterns of ropes and leaves, atop broad piers of baked brick covered in plaster. The piers are in place of columns we’ve seen elsewhere, because the mosque is based on those in Iraq where there were no remnants of Roman buildings to plunder. The arches are framed by floral friezes, made by stamping wood carvings into wet stucco. Between the arches are long hanging lamps on metal chains. Complex geometric patterns adorn the stone window grills which let the sound of prayer out into the streets. On the minbar (a pulpit of sorts), wooden detail is carved in petal-, star-, and octagon-shaped panels. In the center of the mosque is a domed fountain (meida) from the 13^th century.

The oldest mosque in Egypt to survive in its original form, the space is actually a small-scale model of those in Samara (they get bigger! Wow.). Mosques like this one don’t survive in Iraq today, so it’s quite unique in the world of Mamlouk architecture. During its heyday, secondary mikrabs were carved into some of the piers to give crowds of worshipers a directional aid. Today the space is no longer in use, as evidenced by the prayer rugs’ only covering half of each arcade floor. This mosque has had an interesting history of use and disuse—it was once an insane asylum!

(What I don’t get about Egyptian historical preservation is how appreciation levels are low—they were contemplating putting housing on this site!)

One can trace the development of the Arabic language by examining the inscriptions on the walls at Ibn Talun; both Kufic, with no vowels and consonant-distinguishing symbols in stone on a pier, and cursive Arabic, in gold mosaic on the main mikrab, can be seen. Kufic is interesting in that it mirrors the Hebrew of fluent speakers, where no vowel signals are given and words are read correctly only after one gets used to the language in speech. The Kufic plaque at this mosque quotes a passage from the Koran that is very similar to one from daily Jewish prayers, called Vayera.

We passed three brightly-colored posters with photographs and diagrams of the mosque as we left. I smiled at the man untying the cloth covers from my shoes, and thanked him for our visit. He thanked me back.

Leaving the site, I had a few questions about the history surrounding the mosque’s founding dynasty. How did the Mamlouks remain loyal to their masters? Were they brainwashed? Was a drive for social acceptance somehow involved?

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The enormous Mosque and Madrassa of Sultan Hassan is the result of competitive building during the period of Mamlouk rule. No one could build anything bigger at the time, and it is still one of the biggest mosques in the world today. Its immediate predecessors are smaller, yet more detailed to compensate for their size.

The mosque originally housed four colleges, each neatly tucked into a corner of the main sanctuary. This main room, which has no roof and possesses a series of short arcades around a central fountain modest in comparison with others we’ve seen, looks a little like part of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies.

We were treated to a lovely performance by a cantor (I’m not sure what the Arabic term is for this profession), who sang the verses on the upper border of the tomb behind the mikrab (which looked the same as at the Mosque of Ibn Talun). The tomb was built for Hassan, but he went missing and his body never ended up there. Asharaff mouthed the words of the prayer as the cantor manipulated the acoustics in the room (it was really spectacular—Adam has a video).

Walking back towards the entrance, I noticed that this mosque has the same prayer mat pattern on its rugs as we’ve seen elsewhere, sort of like a template for worshipers to find their place. The Sultan Hassan Mosque uses a long strip of this carpet as a walkway for visitors, which looks pretty funny in the middle of the massive, cold stone floors of its center court. I wonder where the mosques get this mass-produced prayer rug fabric…

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Inside the citadel, the hub of power in Cairo from about 1200 through the 1870s, we visited two more mosques, the El-Nasser Mohammad Ibn Qalawoon Mosque and the Mosque of Mohammad Ali.

The ceilings of the arcades at the El-Nasser Mosque are supported by classical columns, as at many other mosques in the neighborhood. It has a spectacular green-tiled dome on top, and beneath are arcade walls of stone. The walls used to be inlayed with marble, which was stripped and sold at some point.

The general feel of this mosque was much “warmer” than at the others. That is to say, the small size of the mosque, coupled with Asharaff praying in front of us against the mikrab, gave life to the structure. It was more welcoming, more cheerful, and more charming.

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The Mosque of Mohammad Ali is constructed in the dome style, like the Hagia Sofia. Until now, we have only explored arcaded and barrel-vaulted mosques.

The structure has a very large chandelier in the center of its main prayer hall, which is surrounded by several metal circles holding large globular lamps in suspension above the ground. The effect sort of looks like a scene from The Prestige, where an inventor creates a field of glowing lightbulbs with no wires, or from the last Harry Potter movie, where floating orbs of light surround the main characters in a dark room.

Well, this room wasn’t so dark. Actually, it had very nice red carpeting (surprise). In one corner is Ali’s tomb, which we weren’t able to get a very good look at. When you walk outside, you get a spectacular view of Cairo, including the pyramids at Giza in the distance. (I took a video—this was a really great way to end our day!)

OLD CAIRO

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love churches. That’s why our trip to Old Cairo today was such a treat; we explored an entire neighborhood of places of worship, which were fascinating despite their current state of 19^th-century style and restoration.

Our day began in the small backyard garden of a local café, where we sipped extra-pricey tea as William explained the origins of some of the buildings in the area. The Fortress of Bablyon, the beginnings of which were constructed during the reign of Trajan (wow, that’s old), encloses our wandering vicinity. It was originally constructed right on the bank of the Nile, but shifts westward by the ground have left it about 300 meters away from its original location at present. The neighborhood inside the fortress became a Christian and Jewish ghetto surrounded by a Muslim city after the Arab conquest. On one side of the fortress walls are two large towers, from which one of the only bridges across the Nile (through Rawdah Island) was once controlled. Today, the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George sits on top of the remains of one tower, while part of the other serves as a pedastil for the Church of the Virgin, or the Suspended Church (Muwalakka in Arabic).

The area outside of the Church of the Virgin, between the two towers at the site of the Coptic Museum, looks like a gated community. The facade of the church sports small windows with pointed arches and little balconies too small for use. Walking inside, I scanned the rows of poster-size photographs of past Coptic popes; among them was a frightening image of a deceased monk, split-frame with another image of his decaying corpse years later. I made a note of this, since it relates directly to my major thesis topic (the exhibition of the dead for institutionalized or ritual purposes), and continued down the hallway.

A lovely open court with bright beige walls and dark wooden fixtures serves as an anteroom for the chapel itself. It reminded me a lot of the atrium at the Frick Museum in New York, one of my favorite places to read and study. A lintel made of Ottoman-Period tiles and dark wood hangs over the door to the chapel. A test-cleaning done by the same Italian team working at the Red Monastery and elsewhere left two bright strips on a column beside the door; William explained that the Italian team was simply too expensive for the church to hire, “a mistake”.

When I entered, I could smell the familiar scent of church incense (my best friend is Greek Orthodox). The gallery is lined with pointed arches and is supported by late-antique columns, while on the ground floor are 12th-century wooden screen walls in cookie-cutter patterns and matte walls decorated with 18th-century icons. A strange podium of sorts sits in the center of the sanctuary, much like those I saw in the churches of Cyprus last summer. The roof tyle is “wagon-vaulted,” according to William, symbolic of Noah’s ark. In the second room, the window cut in the chancel wall (or hiekel wall), originally used to view an icon or statue (like at Gebel el-Tayr), allows visitors to examine a newly-discovered 13th- or 14th-century painting. Elaborate wood and ivory carvings and inlays adorn the chancel wall. Beneath the second room is the substructure of the original Roman tower, which visitors can view through a glass panel in the floor, lined with a light wooden balcony. Before I left, I picked up a photograph of that dead monk poster at the gift shop. Thus starts my thesis-driven collection of dead-people pictures!

What I really loved about the Church of the Virgin was the montage of different eras inside and out. It was such a great mix, really showing the evolution of church artistic and architectural styles. I was also pleased with how many connections I was able to make between this church and those I have visited before. It really feels like I’m building up my churchy-knowledge repertoire!

We exited the church and headed down the block, where we walked down a small staircase to a narrow ally paved with stone. The ally was dotted with churches, and the walls showed pockets of exposed brickface, the blank spaces between filled with peddlers’ merchandise. Adam and I met a (presumably Jewish) merchant who spoke perfect Hebrew. He handed us pamphlets on the restoration of Ben Ezra Synagogue, which we would see later on.

After a nice chat with our new friend, we entered the Church of Abu-Serga, the oldest in the area. The chapel felt much more open than that of the Church of the Virgin, with alternating pitched and domed wooden roofs. Pink garlands hung from the chancel wall, which had the same kind of ivory and wood inlays, as well as carvings of saints, as the last church (an element of 12th- and 13th-century style). The same strange podium sat in the middle of the sanctuary.

The same Italian team I mentioned previously recently uncovered a 13th-century painting of Christ in Majesty in the chapel, painted by the same artist who worked at the Monastery of Saint Anthony in the Eastern Desert: this means that the artist had wealthy and driven patrons, since he was able to travel so far to work on these great pieces.

This church sits above a crypt where the Holy Family is said to have lived at some point. We were able to enter the room with the staircase down into the crypt, where I saw many frustrated worshipers sigh at the throngs of tourists in their house of prayer. I really wish we could have gone to these churches at a time when local Copts were not expected to pray, because I hate being an invasive tourist.

Speaking of not wanting to be disruptive to prayer services, our next stop was an inactive house of worship. Ben Ezra Synagogue, probably the only one we’ll see with this program, no longer has an Eternal Light above its altar (which means it hasn’t been in use for some time). Beautiful columns and statues that look marble–but are really cast-iron–have gold inlays of the Ten Commandments and other religious motifs. Ben Ezra is the site where the Geniza Documents, 11th- to 19th-century records of everyday life, were found in the 1890s. I was expecting pointed arches in the style of churches in the area, but instead found rounded arches and a golden-red and blue ceiling.

The layout of the synagogue is very different from what I’m used to: usually, pews for men are in front of the bima, the women’s pews behind them, separated by a screen. Here the sanctuary is lined with black benches, which means that the men probably prayed on the ground floor, facing the center of the building, and the women in the galleries. This is much like the old style of the Coptic Church, which clearly influenced Jewish practices in the area. On my way out, I gave some money to the cemetery-preservation fund. Unfortunately, we were unable to visit the cemetery.

Our last stop was the Mosque of ‘Amr, the oldest mosque on record (built in 641). It started very small, but was expanded 5 times in 200 years (until about 820), using basilica-style construction turned 90 degrees (everything looks very flat and horizontal, with aisles of worshipers facing inward in a square towards the center space). Because it is a “Friday mosque” where everyone prays together, it grew with the population. The Muslim community grew with the conversion of Christians after a failed rebellion over taxes during the ninth century (likely including Asharaff’s family, according to William). Most of what we saw dates to the latest expansion and update, in about 1980.

The women had to wear these absurd neon-green cloaks, which I felt were less for modesty and more for outcasting because of their color (I’m not being cynical; just honest). We sat on a red carpet floor in the huge, open space lined with classical columns and supported by wooden beams while William lectured a little on Islam.

Woven into the carpet were the outlines of prayer mats, so as to arrange worshipers in neat rows. I was fortunate enough to experience my first realtime Muslim prayer service, where I saw men of all ages following the vocal cues of the voice on the speaker. Their prayer is more of a performance than I expected, and included many acute yet symbolic motions that were intriguing for a nice Jewish girl (like touching one’s hands to his ears in a swift, light movement before kneeling to pray). I think a lot of the assumptions I made about Muslim prayer rituals based on hearing their services as opposed to seeing them were turned on their heads today. I’m really glad we got to sit in on the service, and I hope they enjoyed our company.

Alright, I have to leave this coffee shop. They have the same CD on repeat, and I’ve heard When a Man Loves a Woman and My Heart Will Go On eight times already!