This picture depicts the ceremonial procession of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II (r. 1892-1914) arriving in Cairo, sometime in the early 1900s, in winter time. The street is the Bab al-Hadid street, today al-Jumhuriyya. It connects the train station with the district of Azbakiyya. After the khedive and his entourage descended from the train, the procession supposedly crossed the bridge of Bab al-Hadid, passed Sabil Umm Muhammad ‘Ali al-Saghir, the Awlad ‘Inan mosque, the palace of Nubar Pasha and others, to reach Azbakiyya, the Opera House, and onwards to the ‘Abdin Palace.
A striking feature of this photograph is that we actually cannot see the khedive. We see the people (mostly men) lined up in two sides, the street ornamentation, the houses, the walls, the lamps, the policemen, and the khedivial guards on horses. Perhaps at the very back of the picture one may spot the khedive’s black carriage among the many soldiers and guards, all dressed in white. This absent presence is a fundamental element of the arrival of the highest authority in the city.
The supposed route of the procession, based on map from 1886.
Ceremonial processions, of all kinds – processions of guilds, Sufi orders, weddings, funerals, and of course soldiers – had been a feature of Cairo since centuries. The arrival of the Ottoman governor had been always a highly ceremonial event in the pre-nineteenth century period. The khedives continued and even updated this tradition. In one interpretation, the transformation of Cairo by the governors Mehmed Ali and Said, later by Ismail in the 1860s-70s, included the making of large boulevards as a type of upgrade to provide a new style for the old Islamic and Ottoman ceremonies. By the 1890s, the route from the train station to the ‘Abdin Palace was certainly the long spatial display of authority presence during which life and traffic were frozen and everybody was waiting.
Supposed route in Google Maps
The street is remarkable because capitalists created new, very high apartment buildings in this part of Cairo in the 1900s, although we can still see in the background the tower of the old Awlad ‘Inan (Sufi) mosque (rebuilt in 1907), which had a special relationship to Abbas Hilmi II. We can see numerous Ottoman and other (perhaps British) flags because at the time of the British occupation there was an extra attention on Ottoman aesthetics in fin-de-siècle Cairo. And finally, we can see the people lined up in silent discipline, behind a type of cordon and policemen, waiting patiently to cheer the ruler. Or, waiting in complete boredom, as the men and the boys seem to be in the right corner of the picture.
(A.M.)
Bibliography :
Mercedes Volait, “Appropriating Orientalism? Saber Sabri’s Mamluk Revivals in Late-Nineteenth-Century Cairo,” in Islamic Art in the 19th Century: Tradition, Innovation, And Eclecticism, edited by Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Stephen Vernoit (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 131-155.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.