The contemplation of ruins: Heritage cosmopolitanism and the parsing of Cairo's Islamic Fabric

Abstract

For many of Cairo's diverse inhabitants, the cultural production of a sense of place may find its clearest expression in their dealings with the city's multiple pasts as a resource for enriching and sometime constraining their practices of dwelling. This essay offers an examination of the long-standing discourse within the Muslim Middle East concerning the physical traces that constitute the traditional city as an analytical object, as a social fact. More specifically, it asks how have recent discourses of cosmopolitanism, coupled with the logics of heritage practice, framed a notion of tradition and the ways in which the city is mourned, constructed, and consumed, differentially across its palimpsest fabric. Through an examination of two heritage projects in different parts of the historic landscape of Cairo, this presentation analyzes how the multiplicity of preservationist strategies have sought to cultivate the past as a resource for contemporary forms of dwelling. In comparing the efforts to engage with Cairo's historical landscape through the production of the new al-Azhar Park funded by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) and the Fustat archaeological zone, the location of the first Islamic period settlement in the metropolis, I want to consider what it means to imagine, and then implement, Cairo - this seemingly uncontrollable example of modern urban sprawl - as a heritage city.