Unveiling Cairo: The Ever-Changing Perspectives of Historic Architecture
Walking through historic Cairo is like walking through an open-air museum where layers of history reveal themselves at every turn. Much like museum displays, the architecture of the city changes with each visit — not necessarily in physical form, but in how we perceive it.
I have been going to al-Muʿizz Street almost every Saturday since I started my master’s program in Islamic Art and Architecture three years ago. However, when I toured it last February with the Global Past team, it felt like a totally different experience. Working in small groups of graduate students and scholars, each focusing on a particular site, transformed the familiar into something surprisingly unexpected. The required readings, diverse and philosophical, offered new ways to perceive and relate to these historical sites.
For example, in “Bivisibility: Why Art History is Comparative,” art historian Whitney Davis tries to distinguish between the outer and inner aspects of visibility of existing objects: the outer visibility or what is seen and recognized by people nowadays and the inner visuality or the intended meaning of the historical makers and perceivers at the time it was created. It is this duality, Davis argues, that provokes comparativism in art history [1]. In a way, this concept resonates with our focus on the Mosque of al-Ḥakim near Bab al-Futuḥ. Started by the Fatimid Caliph al-‘Aziz in 990 and finished by his son al-Ḥakim bi-Amr Allah in 1013, the mosque reflects the Fatimid ideology that everything that exists has both an outer visible (ẓāhir) and inner (bāṭin) aspect [2].
However, the visibility of an object in the present and its original visuality in the past are not fixed points but layers accumulated over time, which adds to their sacred identity. The mosque of al-Hakim in particular had many transitional contexts since it was only intermittently used as a mosque. It served as a prison for Crusader captives, a stable by Salaḥ al-Din al-Ayyubi, and a warehouse by Napoleon. After the destruction caused by the 1303 earthquake, major restorations were carried out by Mamluk Sultan Baybars II, followed by repairs by Sultan Hassan in 1359.
The Transitional States of al-Hakim Mosque
Notably, al-Ḥakim was a controversial figure. Visiting al-Muʿizz Street in 2024, I felt fortunate not to live during his reign, marked by unpredictable and eccentric actions. For instance, he banned the consumption of certain foods, killed all dogs in the streets, restricted women’s movements, and, to ensure compliance with this latest law, shoemakers were prohibited from manufacturing women’s shoes. Such prohibitions would have dramatically altered our recent encounter with the site.
Today, the mosque’s most visible elements are the bastioned minarets, which conceal the original freestanding lower parts, containing highly charged allegorical, and ideologically driven inscriptions. Art historians like Jennifer Pruitt suggest that al-Ḥakim’s later ideological shift away from traditional Fatimid Ismaʿili doctrines led to this concealment [3]. In contrast, Bernard O’Kane and Johnathan Bloom propose that the minarets were initially symbolic of Fatimid sovereignty over Mecca and Medina [4]. When the ruler of Mecca rejected Fatimid authority in 1010, al-Ḥakim had the minarets concealed to obscure the political embarrassment [5]. These conflicting perspectives emphasize how the concealment and its motivations can fundamentally alter both the building’s outer visibility and inner visual significance.
Passing through the city gates, we see architecture that has transformed over the years, leading you to the heart of historic Cairo. These gates, however, have witnessed significant historical events: Salah al-Din rode out to meet Richard the Lionheart; al-Ashraf Khalil’s troops expelled European invaders; and Baybars, Qalawun, and al-Nasir Muhammad departed through these gates to defeat the Mongols. So, their visuality to the people who experienced these events was necessarily different. For these people, the gates were shields, protecting Egypt and Cairo as the glorious center of Islamic culture.
While we can describe and relate to the visible remains of our heritage in the present, we can only speculate how such objects were seen and understood by those who constructed and interacted with them previously. Photographs, chronicles, travelers’ diaries, court records, and paintings aid our efforts, but their precise visuality remains elusive. Inner and outer changes alter the value of objects over time. As we move further and further away from an object’s original context, its visuality transforms to embrace personal biases, life experiences, and continued development.
In conclusion, I offer this quotation from Avinoam Shalem: “I, as an individual, am also in a transitional state” [6]. Here, Shalem reminds us that everything in life is in a transitional state, awaiting the next transformation to create another context. The buildings we discussed exemplify this, as layers of history accumulate, shaping multiple perceptions over time. Participating as a graduate student in the Global Past Research Initiative was an eye-opener for me and a transitional state for my own thinking. I realized that our past is perhaps more global than our present, despite the world feeling smaller due to modern technology. Past cultures were more interconnected and global than we think. As we face new global challenges together, such workshops are beneficial for continued cross-cultural integration, helping us understand that it is a small world after all.
NOTES
[1] Davis, W. (2017). Bivisibility: Why art history is comparative. In J. Elsner (Ed.), Comparativism in Art History, (1st ed., pp. 42–59). Routledge.
[2] Pruitt, J. (2020). Building the caliphate: Construction, destruction, and sectarian identity in early Fatimid architecture, (p. 5). Yale University Press.
[3] Ibid.
[4] O’Kane, B. (2016). The Mosques of Egypt, (pp. 17-19). American University of Cairo Press.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Shalem, A. (2021). What a small world: Interpreting works of art in the age of global art history. Getty Research Journal, 13(1), 121–142. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/713432.
Sarah Awni Nasr is an MA student in the Arab and Islamic Civilizations department at the American University in Cairo, specializing in Islamic Art and Architecture. Her research examines how architecture is affected by political, social, and economic factors, with society as the main protagonist.