Manial Palace: A Cairo Gem

Prince Muhammad ‘Ali Tawfiq

Prince Muhammad ‘Ali Tawfiq (1875-1995) was a son of Khedive Tawfiq of Egypt, a brother of Khedive ‘Abbas Hilmi II, and was more than once regent or heir presumptive to the Khediviate/Sultanate/Kingship of Egypt, though he never reached the throne. Even as late as 1952 he was heir presumptive to his cousin King Farouq until the birth of Egypt's last King, Ahmad Fuad II.

Egyptian Streets  reminds us that he also left a gem to Cairo: the Manial Palace on Roda Island, built between 1899 and 1929: "The Palace of Gold in the Heart of Cairo."

The link contains stunning photography of the palace, recently reopened after a 10-year restoration,  by photographer Mohamed Nour, and while recognizing copyright (©FORMA|Photos) I hope I can show one to persuade you to go see the website:

And of course, if you're visiting Cairo, to the Palace and Museum itself.

George T. Scanlon, 1925-2014, Art Historian and Excavator of Fustat

George Scanlon (AUC)

I have belatedly learned that archaeologist and art historian George T. Scanlon died in New York City on July 13 at the age of 89.

In May we talked about potential threats to the excavations at Fustat (Part I, Part II), and anyone with a knowledge of the archaeology of that first Islamic capital of Egypt will be well-acquainted with Scanlon's name (though he also excavated in Nubia). Onetime head of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), and Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University in Cairo from 1975-2011 (a post he took up soon after Sir K.A.C. Creswell left), he was an institution in Cairo and at AUC.

Though we met a few times, I didn't know him well, so I will let others pay tribute:

The official AUC announcement.

An appreciation by Maria Golia at The Arabist.

A 2010 tribute in the ARCE Bulletin on the occasion of Scanlon being honored by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (including the inevitable Zahi Hawass), written by Jere L. Bacharach, a historian who did numismatic work on the coins of Fustat.

UNESCO Lists All Six Syrian World Heritage Sites as Endangered by the War

My frequent posting of old pictures as nostalgia for the weekend will be a little different this week, since UNESCO has listed six Syrian World Heritage Sites as endangered due to the fighting there. We've posted many earlier posts about damage to historic mosques, the old suq and the Great Mosque in Aleppo, and the ruins at Palmyra; now UNESCO has listed the six World Heritage Sites in Syria (all there are) as endangered: the old cities of Aleppo, Bosra, and Damascus; the Ancient Villages of Northern Syria (see my post on them here); the Crac des Chevaliers and Qal‘at Salah al-Din Crusader Castles, and the site of Palmyra. A news story here. So, in honor of these endangered sites, a nostalgia photo of the Citadel of Aleppo in the days of camel caravans:

Today the caravanserai is replaced by car parking, but there has been much damage in the old city generally, and many now expect a major government offensive in Aleppo. The human losses of the Syrian war are irreplaceable of course, but the heritage losses are also of great concern.

Heritage Destruction: Salafis Eradicating Timbuktu's Greatness

Somewhere, Ibn Battuta is weeping.

Although usually not within the purview of this blog, the takeover of the northern, Tuareg parts of Mali (the self-proclaimed "Azawad") first by the MNLA and more recently by radical Islamist groups this year, with links across the borders into Libya and Algeria, have forced attention to the ancient Islamic heritage of the reason. I've posted about Timbuktu's glorious past before, but now, following the fall first of Timbuktu and more recently of Gao to radical Salafist rebels of the Ansar Dine and MUJWA movements, that heritage is in danger. After destruction over the weekend of medieval Saint's tombs in Timbuktu, the Islamists have now destroyed an ancient door, kept closed for centuries, on one of Timbuktu's three great historic mosques, Sidi Yahya:

Among the tombs they destroyed is that of Sidi Mahmoudou, a saint who died in 955, according to the UNESCO website. In addition, on Monday they set upon one of the doors of the Sidi Yahya, a mosque built around 1400. Local legend held that the gate leading to the cemetery would only open on the final day at the end of time.

Local radio host Kader Kalil said that the members of Ansar Dine arrived at the mosque with shovels and pickaxes and yanked off the door, revealing a wall behind it. Kalil said that they explained they were doing so in order to disabuse people of the local legend and to teach them to put their whole faith in the Quran.

"Since my childhood, I have never seen the door on the western side of the mosque open. And I was born in 1947," said Kader, a longtime resident of the city. "When we were children, we were told that the door would only open at the end of time. These religious people want to go to the source, to show us that this is not true. .... Of course our population is not happy. The women, especially, are crying a lot."

Slideshow here. They have sworn to destroy every mausoleum in Timbuktu. UNESCO has put both Timbuktu and the Tomb of Askia in Gao on the Endangered List of heritage sites, which is unlikely to have much impact on the Ansar Dine. This French report shows video of some of the early destruction:


Destruction of tombs is often a Salafi demand: particularly in North Africa, where the Islamic cult of local saints is deeply ingrained, though Salafis have attacked Sufi tombs in Egypt and elsewhere, and when the Saudi Kingdom expanded into the Hijaz in the early 20th Century, many ancient tombs were destroyed by committed Wahhabis. While these monuments, and even the great mosques in Timbuktu, may not be as spectacular as the Buddhas of Bamiyan (destroyed by the Taliban), the destruction of Islamic monuments by those claiming to act in the name of Islam seems even more appalling somehow, though the destruction of heritage monuments is indefensible on any grounds.

As usual, one of the more perceptive commentators is kal at The Moor Next Door, whose latest post-fall-of-Gao analysis is here. MUJWA — the Movement of Unity and Jihad in West Africa — is something of a mystery; it seems to be a sort of offshoot from Al-Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb, but with special emphases:

MUJWA’s propaganda during the Battle of Gao displays its intelligent exploitation of local grievances. A video released to regional media (and posted to the jihadist forums) shows the group’s effort to link its narrative to Songhai nationalist feelings; the video bears the name “Askia,” the name of a Songhai emperor with strong symbol power ... MUJWA has moved from former AQIM subcontractors, members and even drug runners to finding tactical support among members of the city other ethnic groups in the city, in the process projecting an image of ‘popular support’ which may or may not reflect sympathy with the Islamist groups per se as much as a perception of a common enemy.

It's a complicated story; two Twitter tweets (one from kal):

All this aside, this is a tragedy for Mali,for Africa, and for Islamic heritage in general.

A Historical and Architectural Aside: Sir K.A.C. Creswell

Anyone studying Islamic art or the history of Islamic architecture will have heard of K.A.C. Creswell, one of the founders of the field and a pioneer of the Western study of the Islamic architecture of Egypt. That would be Sir Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell, With that name and title I probably don't need to note that he was British (though he was apparently "Archie" to his friends). But Creswell was not your average Oxford don. He had only a technical education in draftsmanship, and a profound interest in architecture. World War I saw him posted to Egypt with the Royal Flying Corps. As a Captain in the Flying Corps he somehow got himself named Inspector of Monuments in Palestine and Syria. And he was off and running. Born in 1879, he was already 40 when he convinced King Fuad I of Egypt in 1920 to support him in a massive scholarly study of Islamic Architecture in Egypt. Out of this came two great multi-volume works, Early Muslim Architecture and The Islamic Architecture of Egypt. He also acquired a massive library on the subject and a myriad of photographs, worked on bibliographies and other studies, and made himself the authority. At least a few decades ago the Survey of Egypt's map of Islamic monuments in Cairo was universally known as "the Creswell map," and may still be. He became a Professor at Fuad I University, later (and also earlier) Cairo University.

When I first went to Egypt in 1972 as a Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) student at the American University in Cairo (AUC), I was aware of Creswell's reputation. He was one of those great figures of the post-World War I generation, born before my grandmother who'd died a decade before, and I assumed that he, too, was long gone. I know that many of my younger readers must think of 1972 as a time when dinosaurs or at least mastodons still roamed the earth, but I can attest that I discovered that indeed, there were still a few giants in the earth in those days. I soon noticed that the AUC community tended to go into a hushed awe when a tiny, wizened, very frail elderly man with a cane, usually dressed in white and as impeccably as in the picture above, passed through the courtyard. So far as I could tell, he might have lived in the school, or at least in the "Creswell Library" which held the Creswell collection. Finally someone said, "that's Creswell." I think my response was, "Is he any relation to the Creswell?" The answer was that he was "the" Creswell. He was 92, walked with a cane, and was deaf as a post, but he was treated like a mythic being, and in some ways, he was. His book collection was housed at AUC, over in the Center for Arabic Studies, not the main library (which was two libraries ago in AUC terms, so I'm not sure where the Creswell collection is housed today). AUC had snagged him when he retired from the University of Cairo. As long as Creswell lived, though, they weren't taking any chances on losing his library. They got it, and they got all his photographic prints as well; the negatives went to the Ashmolean at Oxford. In 1970, he received his knighthood.

Creswell, who never married, was in that year of 1972-73 very much under the protective custody and mother-hen protection of the librarian of the Creswell Library, an enormous (perhaps three or four times his own diminutive weight and volume) Coptic matron known, if memory serves, as Madame Ghamrawi.

I left Egypt after my study year in about May of 1973; according to Wikipedia, Creswell finally returned to Britain the following month of June 1973 (he'd only sporadically visited since leaving in World War I) due to doctor's orders. He died the following April, age 94. When I next returned to Cairo, the folklore of AUC held that what really killed him was having to return to England; if the doctors let him stay in his beloved Egypt, he might have still been around, some claimed.

I can't claim to have "known" him. As the Wikipedia article notes, prior to his death one of his conditions for letting AUC house his library was that mere students couldn't touch the books. He was a researcher, not a teacher/mentor type. By the time I got there his aloofness was greatly enhanced by his stone deafness; I doubt if anyone other than Madame Ghamrawi or the senior Administration of AUC can claim to have known him by then. But I saw him frequently, and I just wanted to note it for the record. His plans, drawings, photographs and analysis of the Islamic monuments of Cairo remains the fundamental underpinning of every study which has followed. Though not academically trained, he trained himself and created an academic field that had barely existed. His work provides many of the fundamental plans and surveys on which later scholarship has been based. A product of the colonial system and an "Orientalist" in a day when that was not yet a pejorative, Creswell was also one of a kind. I really don't know of any other "amateur" whose incredible skill and devotion to a single subject remains quite so influential.