On a recent trip back home to Cairo, I was engaged in conversation with a few relatives over the course of a welcome back dinner party. We were talking about specific developments that have been going around the country that they particularly found charming. Over the past decade or so, the image of the american suburb has been adopted by Egyptian developers, and planted on the outskirts of Cairo, with the intent of boosting up land value of the untouched desert surrounding the capital. A novel idea, since Cairo has been suffering from intense overcrowding density, the city of opportunities for many Egyptians. I believe that the statistic at the time was that 96% of the population was living in 2% of Egypt's land, mainly the nile banks and delta. So creating satellite cities seemed like the way to go to solve this problem.
I digress...At the dinner, a phrase was used to describe one of these developments that really intrigued me, "it has become such a beautiful place, you don't feel that you are in Egypt." It took a few seconds for me to comprehend the gravity of such a phrase. Since when have the criteria for something being successful or beautiful been disassociating it with the surrounding context? Have we (Egyptians) become so ashamed of our country, our culture, our heritage, and ourselves that we feel the need to be identified as something other?
Unfortunately, there is a general sentiment in Egypt that whatever looks or sounds western is considered beautiful. Arabic pop music attempts to mesh arabic singing (using different musical scales and maqams) onto generic western chord progressions and western pop beats. I always felt a disconnect between both, since arabic musical scales would often create slight cacophony when played on western chords (arabic music itself is not based on chords but on heterophony). Even our food is becoming more and more of a copy of other culture's cuisines. Homes now pride themselves in cooking Italian, Chinese, American...etc. It seems Ironic that restaurant moguls are now selling our cuisine back to us, marketing that the menu is composed of "home style Egyptian cooking", overcharging tens of times more than the original cost. It just doesn't make sense to me.
While cross cultural exchange has been around for centuries, the concept of complete westernization is relatively new. Many scholars attribute the initiation to Mohamed Ali's rule in the 19th century. Coming out of a cultural recession and an invasion by France, Egypt was in dire need of a paradigm shift, a boost in the country's cultural richness. Europe has just been experiencing it's own paradigm shift with the Industrial Revolution, so Mohamed Ali thought that a cultural exchange between Egypt and Europe would benefit the country. He started sending many young scholars to continue their education and be exposed to what he thought was a superior region. While some of these scholars came back preaching ideas that helped solve some of the issues lingering in society (Kassim Amin and his ideas of the liberation of women, and Mohamed Abdo's message of tolerance and compassion in religion), others started to apply European concepts without thinking about the consequences. The creation of Downtown Cairo, although is now considered one of Cairo's cultural hotspots, is an example of such. Taken after Hausmann's model of Paris is 1850, the downtown area (West el Balad) was designed to house Neoclassical and Baroque style buildings, where architects all-over Europe jumped at the chance to design in a foreign country with no obligation to respond to contextual buildings.
One of the fundamental ideas of Islamic Cairo is the creation of the inward centered street wall, where the entire street, including the facades of the buildings, becomes public property, and you can't tell where one building ended and the other started. You could not tell the rich man's house and the lesser fortunate one's house apart, as they all belonged to the same street wall. Houses faced an interior courtyard, where each could lavishly decorate according to their financial means. This created a block where the rich and poor can live side by side on the same block, where they are rendered equal outside between the street walls, praying side by side in the mosque. By creating these new european model cities, the rich (who are the only ones who can afford these lavishly decorated baroque buildings) moved out, leaving the poor behind in abandonment, creating, what Galal Amin would call, a social mobility shift, and a tension between the two classes that would continue to grow and intensify as time goes by.
Such effects of globalization, I feel, are much more serious than just the mere image of it that we are reacting against. In Soundscape, R. Murray Schaffer makes an argument suggesting that the drastic conditions of traffic in third world countries are a product of such effects of globalization. Europe, having gone through the whole Industrial and Electrical Revolution, are accustomed to the stop-go mentality of the conveyor belt. He states that those in the third world, having not gone through the whole industrial revolution process from the beginning, are still treating their cars as horse carriages, attempting to finesse their way through traffic, rather than traveling in one lane abiding by traffic regulations. If this is infact the case, then such cultural exchange should be examined carefully before enforcing it to a region.
However, I am not advocating against cross cultural exchange and interchange. The most exciting works of art and inventions have come through a marriage of two elements that has been unprecedented. Oriental jazz brings an exotic blend between arabic musical scales and rhythms while being played under western "jazz" chords and western instruments. Yet here a high level of proficiency in both musical styles independently is need here to be able to identify where such a rub between the two could happen and when would it be highly distorted. I firmly believe that rules are made to be broken, but a conscious breaking of such rules to highlight a specific condition would yield a more powerful result than an breaking of such rules due to general ignorance or negligence.
Which brings me back full circle. Egypt, just like any other place in God's world, is a distinct place. It seems to me, that an indepth study of the characteristics of this place is imperative and unavoidable before designing or composing anything that has to do with the country. Each place has different sensory characteristics, whether its what you see in the urban and rural landscape, what you hear in the soundscape and regions music and language, what you smell in the odors, what you taste in the food, or what you touch in the ground, water, or air. Understand that, you understand the place, and you appreciate the place.
