Just about a month after opening the Suez Canal, on 9 December 1869 the Egyptian government gazette published a strange list containing 58 buildings (mosques, sufi lodges, tombs of saints, and schools) which were recently renovated or constructed in Cairo and Alexandria. The list is strange because, first of all, it is a list (kashf), carefully curated and published. It was the beginning of Ramadan so the list was a reminder of piety, and especially the self-reminder of the piety of the elite readers. But for today’s student of Egypt’s history – and world history – it is curious since the fall of 1869 is usually narrated as the moment of Europeanizing Cairo, by the creation of new streets and infrastructure. Not to talk about the Suez Canal Opening Ceremony, the most advertised moment of Egypt becoming part of European imperial aesthetics and enabling an accelerated world economy.
This 6 Ramadan 1286 issue is the usual mixture of official news in the khedivate of Egypt, an Ottoman Muslim princely polity. It reports that the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph sent medals to the khedivial princes, that an Italian prince sent money to the Department of Pious Foundations for the poor of Cairo, it reports on a school examination in Alexandria (with three not-so-good poems by a local sheikh), and it reproduces a rhymed prose article by Sheikh Mustafa Salama al-Najjari, one of the official praise-writer of the Khedive Ismail. He is praising the technical progress of Egypt and chiefly the opening of the Suez Canal, commemorating it with a short chronogram with the bravura of both the Gregorian and the Hijri dates – fī ʿīd āthār yaqūl muʾarrikhān (=1869) li-l-dāwar(i) Ismaʿīl (!) qad fataḥat al-Qanāl (= 1286). The issue closes with ads about a new scholarly treatise by the shaykh of the Mālikī madhhab and the Frenchman Rancy’s circus performances during Ramadan.
Source: The renovation of the al-Mu’ayyad mosque, 1870s. InVisu, CNRS, “Éléments de décor de la mosquée al-Mu’ayyad,” Le Caire photographié par Facchinelli, http://facchinelli.huma-num.fr/items/show/351.
The list of the renovation (tajdīd) and construction (inshā) of 58 buildings was clearly intended – like Mustafa Salama’s praise of technology – to glorify the khedivial family (the introduction notes that the khedive focuses on the Husayni mosque while his mother is busy with constructing what becomes eventually the monumental Rifāʿī mosque, not even counted in the list) but on a closer look the list discloses many other details. In fact, not the khedivial family but their wider circles, the many Muslim grandees of the Ottoman-Egyptian elite, some merchants, some administrators (also women) of pious foundations, and the new Department of Pious Foundations were the main sponsors. We know that at the same time in 1869, Hoşyar Hanım, the mother of Ismail Pasha, also established a small pious foundation for old mosques in the countryside. Was this list in the official gazette the public front of a concentrated wave of renovations of Muslim spaces of religion and education as opposed – or in parallel – to the Europeanizing innovations? Or just a Ramadan reminder?
Bibliography:
Al-Waqāʾīʿ al-Miṣriyya, 6 Ramadan 1286 / 9 December 1869.
For more on khedivial mosques, see the MA dissertation of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Muḥammad Ḥujāj, “Al-Ṭirāz al-Miʿmārī wa-l-Fannī li-l-Masājid al-Qāhira fī al-Qarn al-Thālith ʿAshar al-Hijrī (1215-1318),” 2 vols (Cairo University, 2006).
For Mustafa Salama al-Najjari, see Adam Mestyan, Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo: Muṣṭafā Salāma al-Naǧǧārī’s The Garden of Ismail’s Praise (Cairo: Ifao, 2021).
For Hoşyar’s small pious foundation, see Adam Mestyan, “Seeing Like a Khedivate: Taxing Endowed Agricultural Land, Proofs of Ownership, and the Land Administration in Egypt, 1869.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 5–6 (2020): 743–87.
For Rifāʿī mosque, see Max Herz, La mosquée el-Rifaï au Caire (Milan: Humbert Allegretti, [1911]).
Ormos István, Max Herz Pasha (1856-1919). His Life and Career (Cairo: Ifao, 2009), 2 vols.
Le Caire photographié par Facchinelli (direction scientifique par Mercedes Volait): http://facchinelli.huma-num.fr/
(A.M.)
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