Private Lives in Cairo:
Domestic Architecture

June 14, 2006

The picture above seems to say something quite important about Egyptian life. Here are four empty benches, right out front of a busy little street. One might expect that these benches would be crowded as people spot a place to relax.. but that is rarely the case. These benches are usually empty. What is more, they are not historical features of the cityscape.. unlike the sabils, or public water dispensers.

My sense is that Cairenes are uneasy with the publicly private world that sitting on a bench entails. The streets are for walking and working.. with cafes for sitting and chatting. But there is no such thing as private space within the public sphere. The emotions and freedom which I feel when I imagine a small green park within a city.. where I can sit and read and watch people.. those emotions are strongly assosciated here with home and its private space.

I should mention that there are benches along the Corniche, as well as a few parks with rows of benches.. but these are overwhelmingly populated by young couples. In other words: people who do not have their own private space and so must meet in special public places. Parks are for courtship, and that is a far cry from the multi-purpose use of public space as we know it in the west.

This brings me to a description of Bayt Suhaymi, which is located right beside these benches. According to our guide, this was the house of a shaykh at al-Azhar (just down the road). Students showed up here for Qur'an readings and the shaykh kept a household numbering 201 people. I tried to get a line on the breakdown of those people (i.e. how many wives, how many children), but failed.

What is immediately striking, walking through this 19th century house, is the complicated separation of public and private. Downstairs is a main entrance that leads to a beautiful room with a marble fountain in the center. Then a little further on is a large room with plenty of chairs.. Perfect for a meeting of important men.

Then there are tight staircases leading from these rooms to the upstairs portions of the house. The second floor consists of a string of rooms connected to each other, but maintaining resolute privacy from the public world downstairs. There are no grand staircases making a display of the transition between a reception room and more private areas of the house.. as we might expect in grand western houses.

My biggest surprise came with our entrance to the truly gorgeous room which was the private residence for the shaykh and his wives. The room was lined with Turkish tiles.. which is definitely the style of decoration I would choose. But again, it seemed strange to reserve such beauty for the absolute most interior room of the house. Few people made it to this place.. I am sure.. Which seems a waste of so much beauty:

The outdoors would of course have been a bit more accessible. The primary focal point of the house was not the narrow street, but the internal courtyard in the center of the house. Toward this peaceful area the large windows faced, lined with wooden lattice work. This focus on an internal court matches what I have seen in both Morocco and Syria.. and so I would call this a characteristic of Middle Eastern living arrangements.

It is striking in the above picture that even though the courtyard is all part of the same house, the upper stories are still equipped with the wooden lattices (mashrabiyyas).. which are easy to look out from, but hard to see into. These lattices work as architectural veils for women who are looking into the public area of the house.. where students or acquaintances could be walking around.

Just as in religious architecture, the lintels of doors tend to be specially decorated. The same kinds of medallions and abstracted designs show up. Above the main reception room a brilliantly painted ceiling hovered over the visitor:

One point about which I am curious is the use of poetry in private settings. Such poetry reminds me of the fragments of Islamic ceramics which feature drinking and general merry-making.. I see those fragments and wonder about their possible setting. But it is the old problem of uneven preservation. Lots of mosques make it to our time.. but very very little in the way of private residences and palaces. By the nature of the case, a family's private domestic world tended not to be preserved.. whereas a mosque quickly acquired public value. But the existence of these private worlds suggests a place for the secular arts. Doris Behrens-Abouseif mentions that inscriptions of poetry can take the place of Quranic inscriptions in these buildings.. which leaves open an interesting approach to Arabic poetry: as an art form which especially found its home in the private setting..