Fuad Plans to Remodel Cairo City

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 28 July 1928, Page 10

Fuad Plans to Remodel Cairo City

Where the West Jostles With the East

ANCIENT AND MODERN the sanction of King Fuad I. of Egypt, -who believes in the gradual application of modern methods to his ancient realm, several wide and up-to-date thoroughfares are to be cut through the native section of Cairo—that labyrinth of narrow, winding, genuinely Oriental streets and alleyways which is the delight of the artist and the despair of the utilitarian. Fuad, to be sure, has insisted that the essential character of the old parts of his capital must not be changed. He is not another Ismail Pasha, wishing to wave a magician’s wand over Cairo and transform it into a second Paris. Nevertheless, the first step has been taken. The townplanner lias cast his eye on old Cairo. Scores of old rookeries, of ramshackle congeries of dwellings and shops, and latticed windows from behind which women of the harem looked out on the street without being seen by passers-by, have fallen under the pick of the housebreaker. Already a broad pathway of destruction extends from a point just south of the Muski, the principal street of Oriental Cairo, to the El-Azhar University, the most famous, influential, and fanatically conservative of all institutions of learning in the entire Moslem world.

In addition to the new street which will pierce its irreverent way to the portals of El-Azhar, a boulevard is to be cut from a short distance north of the Muski diagonally across a por-

tion of the native quarters of Cairo, mowing down everything ancient and Oriental which its finds in its path, toward the suburb of Abbasieh, which until now has remained far outside the sphere of modern progress. After the completion of these two up-to-date thoroughfares, others are to follow —-for, like the tiger and its taste for blood, the appetite of the townplanner grows with every old house that he tears down, with every crooked alleyway that, he transforms into a, straight avenue. Sharply Drawn Line In order to realise what these changes mean, it is necessary to know Cairo. Nowhere is the line of demarcation more sharply drawn between the Occident and the Orient than in King Fuad’s capital. If a visitor stays around the big hotels, never ventures outside the Ismailieh and Tewfikieb 'quarters, never strays east of the Ezbekieh Gardens, he will see a modern town, a town of handsome streets and shops, of. banks, tourist agencies, motor-cars, and street-car tracks, with no trace of the Orient except, in the costumes of the natives, who, even when in this part of Cairo —whioTi might as well be the Etoile Quarter of Paris —cling to turban and tarboosh, long robes, yellow slippers, and red sashes. But as soon as the visitor wanders eastward,- past the Ezbekieh and the Ataba-el-Khadra, he will find himself in another world and another century. He will be in the Cairo of the Arabian Nights, picking his way along alleys so narrow that no carriage can enter them, the upper storeys of the houses almost touch, where pedestrians are mixed up with camels and donkeys, where itinerant sellers of Oriental drinks and sweetmeats cry their wares, where veiled women trip past, where the roadway is lined with scores of little shops in which the shopkeepers sit cross-legged, patiently waiting for customers. He will sniff the scent of Eastern perfumes offered for sale in the Street of the Perfume Makers; gaze curiously at the shabby old volumes displayed in the Street of the Booksellers; finger the trinkets set out in the Street of the Goldsmiths. He will imagine himself in the places and times described by Omar the Tent-maker, and find it the most natural thing in the world, when he strays into the street of the tentmakers, which exists in Cairo to this day, and sees the tent-makers squatting among their wares of brilliant hue, bargaining with customers who are about to journey into the desert, and will need tents when they camp at night under the stars. Tt is upon this bit of the Orient that the town-planner has, cast his eye. Against the crazy walls of its dwellings and shops the housewrecker is already swinging his pick. So it behoves the lover of the picturesque to hurry up, in case he has never visited Egypt, in order that he may feast his eyes on the Cairo of the Arabian Nights before townplanner and house-wrecker have worked their will on it.

And as for the utilitarian, he might defer visiting Cairo for, let us say, 10 years. Then —who knows?—he may find nothing there to jar his twentieth century susceptibilities.