In Cairo’s City of the Dead, where homes are mausoleums and communities have grown among the graves, residents speak out against the destruction of their lives and heritage – and the silence that surrounds it
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These politicians have no respect for the dead. They destroy mosques, schools and people’s homes. Their end will be black.’ A thick blanket wrapped around her to fight off the winter chill, the elderly woman (who, for fear of retaliation, preferred to remain nameless) sat at the side of a wooden tea shack surrounded by the rubble of what was left of her home. ‘People from the government came and said we had two months to leave. There was no negotiation. When they came with their bulldozers and the police, they destroyed everything. People had to dig the bones of their ancestors out of the ground by hand and rebury them elsewhere.’ She pauses – anger coursing through her veins – before adding, ‘May God take revenge on these people.’
In most of the world, cemeteries are places of silence and decay, but here in Cairo’s City of the Dead (al-Qarafa), a vast seventh-century necropolis that spreads away from the Mokattam Hills towards the historic heart of the Egyptian capital, life and death entwine. Founded by Amar Ibn al-As, who led the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the necropolis – which is divided into the northern and southern cemeteries – covers more than six square kilometres and is one of the world’s largest cemeteries, as well as the oldest Muslim cemetery still in use. Among the tens of thousands of Cairenes (inhabitants of Cairo) laid to rest here are kings, saints, writers, caliphs and artists. But what makes this cemetery particularly special isn’t so much the scale of the place, but the fact that alongside the dead are the living.
At first, it was only the dead who slept here. But over time, as Cairo’s population increased and housing became ever harder to come by, more and more people moved into the area and, in many cases, they lived – and continue to live – actually within the mausoleums of the dead. The first records of people living here permanently date back to an 1898 census, which recorded 35 individuals residing in the City of the Dead. By 1947, there were some 69,000 inhabitants, and by 1986, that number had jumped to 180,000. Today, nobody really knows for sure how many people live here, though some sources say it might be as many as one and a half million. Most of the living inhabitants come from a background of poverty and moved here because rent is very low or even non-existent. Most of the time, the families living within a mausoleum aren’t related to the deceased. Instead, they’ve negotiated with the family of the dead to live there in return for tending the grave. As well as the financial benefits, there are other advantages, as the woman, who sat surrounded by the ruins of her home, had told me: ‘It’s central, quiet and we all know one another. It’s more like a village.’
With such a large living, breathing population, the City of the Dead is now a thriving city within a city. There are schools, shops, clinics, tea houses and a real sense of community. Artwork adorns walls and centuries-old masterpieces of Islamic architecture crowd together. The most impressive structures are tombs – often with mosques integrated within them – for the richest and most powerful families. Some, such as the 15th-century funerary complex of Sultan Qaytbay (which is pictured on the Egyptian one pound banknote), the mausoleum of Imam Shafi and the Sultaniyya mausoleum, are considered among the most significant historical buildings in Egypt – quite an achievement for a country that can claim the Pyramids as its own. So important is the architecture of the City of the Dead that in 1979 it was, alongside the rest of historic Cairo, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. When I asked Egyptologist Ahmed Seddik about the cultural and historical significance of the City of the Dead, he put it in highly poetic terms: ‘The City of the Dead is no mere cemetery. It’s the Valley of the Kings dressed in a turban and wrapped in a robe. It’s Egypt’s royal address for the Muslim world’s greatest minds and mightiest men and women. The domes there don’t just rise. They soar. Like the thoughts of the scholars beneath them. If the Giza Pyramids are Egypt’s stone-born sermons from the Pharaonic age, then these towering marvels are Islam’s sonnets in stone – carved in calligraphy and crowned with crescents.’
With an estimated population of just over 22 million, Cairo has always been one of the world’s commercial, cultural and political hubs. From the foundation of Memphis, the centre of Ancient Egypt, some 5,000 years ago, to the establishment of what is today Old (Islamic) Cairo in 969 CE, right up to the 19th-century boulevards of downtown, Cairo has been reborn again and again in different styles under different rulers. However, this almost organic growth of the city – combined with a lack of modern town planning, intense traffic congestion, high levels of pollution and insufficient housing – means that even the city’s most diehard fans will likely agree that Cairo’s current infrastructure simply can’t cope with the number of people living here.
To solve the problems of an overpopulated Cairo, the Egyptian authorities have launched an ambitious project called Egypt Vision 2030, which aims to redesign much of Cairo (and other parts of Egypt) through new road systems and business, leisure and housing opportunities. They’re even building a brand-new capital city just to the east of Cairo called – rather unimaginatively – the New Administrative Capital (NAC). According to the Egypt Vision 2030 project wording, all this work is to be carried out in a way that ensures that ‘every Egyptian reaps the benefits of the development process in an equitable and sustainable manner’.
All of this sounds very commendable, but to achieve the goals of Egypt Vision 2030, large-scale demolitions have taken place across Cairo – and in the historic City of the Dead in particular – and not everyone believes that these demolitions are taking place in a way in that ‘every Egyptian reaps the benefits of the development process in an equitable and sustainable manner’. In fact, many local activists say that the destruction of parts of the City of the Dead is part of an increasing trend in Egypt of compulsory mass evictions of historic neighbourhoods to make way for luxury housing for the rich. When it comes to the NAC in particular, those same detractors say that it’s less about creating a modern centre of government and more about separating the government from the people, making the kind of large anti-government protests – such as those in the 2011 Arab Spring that led to the fall of Egypt’s previous military strongman, Hosni Mubarak – much harder.
Back in the City of the Dead, I leave the woman sat outside the ruins of her home and walk further down the street to a mosque – or what’s left of a mosque. ‘The mosque was still in use just a few weeks ago,’ the caretaker, who had been busy picking through the rubble, tells me. ‘Government people came and told the imam to leave. Yesterday, they came with bulldozers and knocked it all down. You cannot protest. If you do, they just put you in prison. They come with police and soldiers and force everyone away. This mosque was built in 1959 and it’s also a tomb. Don’t they know that in Islam it’s forbidden to destroy a mosque?’
His comments about not being able to protest appear to be shared by many others in Cairo. Finding someone willing to take me to the parts of the City of the Dead that have been affected by the demolitions wasn’t easy. Most people I tried to talk to about it immediately closed the conversation. Emails I sent to pressure groups, private individuals or organisations working to safeguard Cairo’s rich historical legacy either went unanswered or, at best, were returned with a brief response saying they were happy to talk about anything except the demolitions.
Eventually, I found someone willing to show me the destruction. He insisted on remaining anonymous, that we travel by motorbike (‘because it’s quicker to get away’), never stop for long in one place, and that any photos I took were shot discreetly from my hip while on the move. Although my guide didn’t live in the City of the Dead, he told me his grandfather had been buried there and that he and other family members had to dig the body out of the ground after the authorities destroyed the tomb. ‘The body hadn’t fully decomposed. It was a horrible thing to have to do,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Many of the tombs are looted just before they’re destroyed. Everyone in Cairo is against what is happening.’
Although many Cairenes do appear to be against the way in which the demolitions and restructuring of Cairo are being carried out, most will, perhaps grudgingly, admit that the results are making life easier. I spoke to a member of the online pressure group Safeguard of Historic Cairo’s Cemeteries (who also wished to remain anonymous), which was set up to try to save some of the more historically and culturally valuable buildings from the bulldozers. ‘We cannot deny that the new roads are making it easier to get around Cairo, but there were other solutions they could have used that wouldn’t have been so destructive.’ It’s a sentiment that UNESCO also appears to share. In a recent statement, the UN agency said that its experts were in contact with the Egyptian authorities to ‘reconcile the planned urban development projects with the necessary World Heritage protection, in line with Egypt’s international commitments.’
When I ask my contact at Safeguard of Historic Cairo’s Cemeteries if their campaign would succeed, he seems downhearted. ‘Here in Egypt, we don’t have much money, but we do have a lot of history and culture, and it makes me sad that we are destroying it. It’s just… crazy, really. We’ve had some success at delaying demolitions, but in the end, they always come back when nobody is watching and destroy it anyway.’ He sighs before continuing, ‘I’m tired of talking about it. At the start, I thought they just didn’t know what we stood to lose, so I made a lot of noise. But they know what they’re doing. They just don’t care. I’m talking about it less and less now. There’s no reason to talk anymore. They’ll just destroy our history anyway.’
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As I continue to explore the City of the Dead, I meet two elderly women talking together outside a brightly painted yellow house. When I ask about the demolitions, they cast nervous glances up and down the silent street, before one of the women beckons me into her home so we can talk away from prying eyes. Sitting down in the courtyard, at the centre of which are two tombstones, the woman (who again preferred to remain anonymous) hands me a sweet black tea. ‘I have been living here for 20 years. It’s calm, central and it’s free,’ she says. ‘This isn’t my family mausoleum. I just look after it for someone else. We used to live in a different part of the city. My husband was a painter and decorator, but we had very little money, so when the rent in our old house went up, we couldn’t afford to pay it anymore. Shortly afterwards, I met a lady who said she needed someone to look after her family mausoleum. We moved straight in here. That lady is now dead. Her tomb is in the room over there,’ she says, pointing into a dark side room.
‘Will we lose our house? I don’t know. They’ve already destroyed the neighbours’ houses. They don’t tell us what is going to happen. When they destroy someone’s house, they give very little notice and only a very small amount of money as compensation. They give us somewhere else to bury the bodies, but it’s normally a long way out of Cairo. We must even move the dead ourselves,’ she says with incredulity. ‘The worst thing is that it destroys the community. Most of us have lived here for years. We are friends and family. But then they move us somewhere far from Cairo. I don’t know where we will go if we have to leave.’
When I put it to her that one of the criteria for Egypt Vision 2030 is that ‘every Egyptian reaps the benefits of the development process in an equitable and sustainable manner’, she just laughs and says, ‘I’m not a rich person, so maybe I don’t count.’
In order to get an official perspective on the demolitions, I contacted the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities via email to request a statement on the demolitions and allegations of forced displacement. My emails were ignored.
After I had spent a couple of days in the City of the Dead, talking to people and sneaking past security in order to visit demolition sites, it occurred to me that
I didn’t really know where all these vast new highways ploughing through this place of immense cultural and historical value actually led to. It was then that my contact from Safeguard of Historic Cairo’s Cemeteries revealed the real irony of the situation to me: ‘We are losing so much – our heritage, our history, our art, our architecture. They are destroying the very civilisation of Egypt – just so that they can build big, modern roads leading to the Museum of Egyptian Civilisations.’
