The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

occurred in 1821 when Jean-François Champollion
(1790–1832) began deciphering hieroglyphics from the
Rosetta Stone, thus initiating the birth of Egyptology.
The contributions of such pioneering scholars as
Auguste Mariette (1821–81), Richard Lepsius
(1810–84), Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875),
Sir William Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), George Reisner
(1867–1942), James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) and
Howard Carter (1874–1939) secured Western domination
in the field of Egyptology well into the twentieth
century. Egyptology did not pretend to be about anything
other than the study of ancient Egypt, and the
spectacular success of its findings, climaxing with the
discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, ensured that only
the Pharaonic world would capture the European
imagination.
By comparison, Western scholars studying Islamic
Egypt during the same period were extremely thin on
the ground. The earliest accounts of Cairo occur in two
works published in 1743: Richard Pococke’s Descriptions
of the East and Charles Perry’s View of the Levant. Both
explored the remoter parts of Egypt and it is interesting
to note that Perry was prompted to leave Cairo because
he was ‘sick and surfeited’ by endless discussions of the
pyramids. 3 They were travellers rather than scholars and
it was not until 1836 that any serious study of Islamic
Egypt appeared. This was Edward William Lane’s
(1801–1876) encyclopaedic work, An Account of the
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. It became a
best-seller when it was first published as a companion
volume to Sir John Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and
Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. Lane’s book is
particularly useful because it described a society that had
changed little since the Middle Ages. For this reason, a
number of his observations tally with those of medieval
historians, like al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), and they have
occasionally provided useful contextual material for some
of the buildings described in this book.
The next serious scholar to appear on the scene
was Lane’s grandnephew, Stanley Lane-Poole. His book
A History of Egypt was published in 1901 as the last of a
series of histories edited by Sir William Flinders Petrie.
2 The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo
This is still the only adequate book in English devoted
to the history of Islamic Egypt from the Arab to the
Ottoman conquests. He also wrote the only book, The
Art of the Saracens in Egypt (1886), that attempts a
general survey of Islamic art and architecture in Egypt. 4
Another early history of epic proportions is A. J. Butler’s
classic work, The Arab Conquest of Egypt, published in
1902. Thereafter all the more recent histories available
in English are mainly concerned with the period of the
Crusades. Among others, these include Stephen
Runciman’s A History of the Crusades in three volumes
(1951, 1952 and 1954), Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades
through Arab Eyes (1990), P. M. Holt’s The Age of the
Crusades (1986) and Peter Thoreau’s The Lion of Egypt:
Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth
Century (1987). With the exception of the Lebanese
writer Maalouf, it could be argued that these excellent
works provide further evidence of Eurocentric
scholarship. More recently two extremely useful books,
full of new topographical research, Al-Fustat: Its
Foundation and Early Urban Development (1987) by
Wladyslaw B. Kubiak and Ayyubid Cairo: A Topographical
Study by Neil D. MacKenzie (1992), have been
published by the American University in Cairo Press.
It is, however, generally the case that the shelves of
libraries and bookshops are replete with books on
Pharaonic and twentieth-century Egypt, but with the
exception of the above-named volumes, there is very
little that deals with the history in between. Of available
books on the art and architecture of Egypt few cover the
Islamic period. The two principal books on architecture
are K. A. C. Creswell’s The Muslim Architecture of Egypt
(1959) and Doris Behrens-Abouseif’s Islamic Architecture
in Cairo: An Introduction (1989). There is also A Practical
Guide to the Islamic Monuments in Cairo by R. Parker and
S. Sabin – a very useful tourist guide. Of more recent
books there are H. and A. Stierlin’s Splendours of an
Islamic World: Mamluk Art in Cairo 1250–1517 (1997) and
Anna Contandi’s Fatimid Art at the Victoria and Albert
Museum (1998). Three essential general works with
excellent material on Egypt are Islamic Architecture: Form,
Function and Meaning by Robert Hillenbrand (1994), The