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ARCHITECTURE IN FACT AND FICTION: THE CASE OF THE NEWGOURNA VILLAGE IN UPPER EGYPT

In 1946, the architect Hassan Fathy (1900-89; fig. 1)was commissioned by the Egyptian government to planand build a new village for the inhabitants of OldGourna, who for generations had lived directly abovethe rock-hewn tombs in the cemetery of Thebes onthe western mountain side of the Nile, near Luxor(fig. 2). The purpose of the project was to put anend to the villagers' age-old livelihood of robbingantiquities from the Pharaonic tombs and offeringthem up for sale to archaeologists, tourists, and any-one else who set store by these treasures.

Fig. 1. Hassan Fathy in 1984. (Photo: Christopher Little/AgaKhan Award for Architecture, Geneva)

The planning and building of the new village tookabout three years; when it was finished art histori-ans, anthropologists, and sociologists, mainly in theWest, extolled the inventiveness of Fathy's design andhis extraordinary sensitivity to climatic problems, lo-cal materials, and traditional Islamic architecture. Thevillagers on the mountain, however, sullenly resistedthe government's offer to relocate them and wouldnot consent to move to Fathy's model village.

Official reports and articles published in Egypt andin the West, as well as the book written by the archi-tect himself in 1969, Architecture for the Poor,1 ascribedthe refusal of the Gourna community to red tape,failure to supply alternative sources of income, andother problems,2 and presented a one-sided view,largely in the form of value judgments that did notreflect the open -and more especially the hidden con-flicts between the authorities and the villagers.

The case of New Gourna, ostensibly a story aboutthe social cohesion of a community of villager graverobbers refusing to give up a lucrative livelihood andholding their own against the establishment's pro-fessed endeavor to effect a major improvement in

Fig. 2. Typical street in Gourna. (Photo: Hasan-Uddin Khan)

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Fig. 3. New Gourna Village. General plan. (Plan: courtesy Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Geneva)

their lives encapsulates another story, another fieldof significance, which raises questions about the abilityof visual representation-an architectural project, inthis instance-to reconstruct and preserve an authenticculture. Here we will deal with the question whetherHassan Fathy's model village, universally acknowledgedto be a masterly reconstruction of an authentic ex-perience3 from the strictly architectural point of view,was genuinely attuned to the mental state and lifepatterns of the population for which it was planned.

On the face of things, the answer is yes. In his designFathy stayed close to the Nubian tradition, using mudbrick, its characteristic building material, Pharaonicarchitectonic elements,4 such as unsupported arch-es and vaults; and, in particular, upholding the tradi-tional values of Islam, answering the fundamental andall-encompassing need for observance of the Muslimmores, and demonstrating coherence between struc-tural and sociological needs.

The underlying organizational principle of Fathy'splan is a physical manifestation of the balancing ofthe needs of the Islamic social system, with its clearseparation of private life, as reflected in the tradi-

tional roles of men and women, from participationin the economic and religious life of the community.Throughout the project, the architect was guided bythis paradigm of seclusion versus exposure, as con-veyed by the three-tiered hierarchy of spaces-pub-lic, semi-public, and private-in the village structure(fig. 3).5

The public space was composed of the main street,the central square, and fhe buildings opening ontoit: a khan, a mosque, a theater, a village hall, etc.The streets were wide, well lit and airy, and allowedfor an easy flow of traffic (fig. 4). The semi-publicspace consisted of narrow, intimate, shaded laneswinding their way towards the small squares at thecenter of clusters of houses linked by extended fam-ily relations (badana)6 (fig. 5). The private space tookthe form of a building with a central open courtyard,enclosed by a fence, modeled on the qa'a, the medi-eval Cairo dwelling. 7

The public space was designed for the men, theprivate space for the women, the family, and the live-stock. The semi-public space linked the two. Theprivate space spilled into the semi-public space on

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Fig. 4. New Gourna Village. Central square. (Photo: Chant Ave-dissian/Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Geneva)

Fig. 5. New Gourna Village. Cluster of houses inhabited by re-lated families (badana). (Photo: courtesy Aga Khan Award forArchitecture, Geneva)

festive and solemn occasions; it could also be usedfor storage, etc. Women could walk around freely inthis precinct; it was off-limits to strangers.

Fathy's village plan, a replica of the medieval Mus-lim city, was directly modeled on Cairo. Incidentally,in 1987, forty years after the planning of New Gour-na village, the anthropologist Janet L. Abu-Lughodattacked Western scholars for "imposing" on themedieval Muslim city plan a grid of streets meetingin the center and thus representing the ideal of cos-mic order embodied in the Western city plan. TheMuslim city or village plan in contrast, Abu-Lughodmaintained, must be coherently structured on thesocial concepts of Islam.8 As we have seen, Hassan

Fathy had already set out to implement those con-cepts in the 1940's.

Ten years after the village was built, the Egyptianwriter and journalist Fathi Ghanim (b. 1923) pub-lished a novella, his first work of fiction. In it hequestions the architect's project (the designer is re-ferred to throughout simply as "the engineer," with-out a specific name) and reexamines the concept ofauthenticity and its representation in art (i.e., archi-tecture) and literature.

Fathi's novella, al-Jabal (The Mountain),9 was basedon the author's own experiences in the late 1940's,while serving as superintendent of investigations inthe Egyptian Ministry of Education. In it, theauthor-narrator is dispatched by the authorities to findout why the Gourna inhabitants had refused to moveto their new model village. He does so through anaccount by the architect and the reactions of twoGourna elders, the traditional Egyptian village lead-er ('umdah), and Hussein 'Ali. The story is presentedthrough the eyes of the narrator. At the end of theinquiry, the narrator returns to Cairo and resigns fromhis post. The investigation file remains empty. Theauthor, like the architect, had come to the moun-tain as an emissary of the authorities. He, too, is anintellectual, a university graduate, a Cairene, a rep-resentative, in this context, of high culture, of progress,of enlightenment. However, over the course of hisjourney to the mountain, he undergoes a profoundchange in attitude. Unfolding the story of the con-flict between the Gourna villagers and the architect,he gives a detailed account of their way of life, por-traying them as poor, ignorant, shrewd but loyal, sim-ple, genial and warm-authentic Egyptians:

In the pale light after sunset, I saw on the horizon themassive silhouettes of two groups of figures, men andwomen, separate and at a distance from one another,all squatting on the sands. I clearly distinguished thetwo silhouettes and could not believe my eyes. Theyare relieving themselves; they are using their moun-tain privies. I couldn't restrain myself and asked the'umdah: "'umdah, what are they doing?" And the 'umdahanswered simply: "Come, my son, let us join them andhave a good time." (pp. 81-82)

In other words, the reality of the architect-plannedvillage is confronted with a fictional reality that seeksto undermine the premise of Hassan Fathy'squasi-authentic ideas, which the author regards ashalf-baked fantasies about authenticity, originating in

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Fig. 6. New Gourna Village. Dome of mosque, exterior view.(Photo: Hasan-Uddin Khan)

a Western concept of the welfare and comfort of theindividual tacked onto the local tradition. "A widechasm," Fathi Ghanim maintains, "divides a crude,primitive and awkward humanity from a prosperousculture, superficial and restless.... The mountainvillagers are humane; the city dwellers are hollow andlacking in feeling" (p. 95).

This duality is intriguingly exposed in the elementof the dome. Hassan Fathy uses this architectoniccomponent in a variety of ways. On the functionallevel, he tops all the village houses with domes as ameans of regulating the temperature and ventilatingthe houses of the New Gourna village, in combina-tion with traditional ventilation methods such as theclaustrum, the malqaf, and the mashrabiyya.1 0 In thisway, he attempts to solve problems pertaining to theflow of hot and cold air; shading of sun-drenchedroofs; calculation of the amount of radiation on agiven convex surface, air holes, and so forth.

On the aesthetic level, to avoid a monotonous, stan-dardized appearance, Fathy joins to the domes andvaults on the roof a square, gallery-like space whichcasts shade on the opposite dome. Here the archi-tect juxtaposes rows of simple circles and squares,creating an attractive silhouette of forms carrying ona "dialogue" and emphasizing the undulating skylineof the dwelling houses rather than the uniform build-ing materials.

He uses the dome for illumination, especially inthe mosque (figs. 6-7), where windows inserted alongthe sides of the dome as well as on the drum andbetween the squinches, as in the Mamluk domes ofCairo, focus the penetrating rays of light on elements

of special importance. Another function of light, asFathy explains in his book, is "to make a buildingthat should have that sober and calm air that leadsto quiet meditation and prayer."ll In medieval ar-chitecture, light, in addition to being perceived as asymbol of divine unity, also served a decorative func-tion in shaping and modulating architectural orna-mentation.12

On the symbolic-iconographic level, Fathy drewinspiration from Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo, andespecially from the Suhaymi and Jamal al-Dinal-Dhahabi houses, both of which are still extant. 3

Technically the domes are connected to the build-ings by means of squinches, both in Cairo (fig. 8)and in Fathy's buildings (especially in the mosque;see fig. 9). But the most interesting aspect of his useof the dome is the cosmic significance he attaches toit:

... it certainly gave a symbolic value to the house, whichwas considered to be a model or microcosm of theuniverse. In fact, the metaphor was extended furtherto the eight sides of the octagon that supports thesquinches, a dome symbolizing the sky; these eight sideswere held to represent the eight angels who supportthe throne of God. 14

The narrator of al-Jabal tells us that the Old Gournavillagers do not understand the architect's extendeduse of the dome, "When the lorry reached the hill-side, we saw before us the caves dotting the slopeand the lone dome of a tomb. Probably the tomb ofa sheikh gracing the al-Gourna village" (pp. 53-54).And further:

His wife joined the conversation. I was struck by heraesthetic critique of the engineering of the houses ofthe model village. She's not happy about the domesthe architect superimposed on the buildings since, inher view, only the tomb of a holy man is topped with adome-but that's a tomb! Why does the architect in-sist on housing them in graves? She's not dead yet, sowhy does she have to enter a house with a dome. No,she'll stay right here and go on living in her cave. Ifthe government wants to move her to the engineer'shouse, it can take her corpse after she dies and bury itin one of the houses. She won't object to the modelvillage being used as a cemetery for the mountain vil-lagers. (p. 67)

Finally, the story views the dome from another, un-expected, if not entirely astonishing, angle, when aFrenchwoman (the onetime mistress of Auguste Ro-

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I

Fig. 7. The mosque. South facade. (Photo: Christopher Little/Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Geneva)

Fig. 8. Cairo. Mamluk dome of ablution fountain (13th century) in the courtyard of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun. (Photo: Hasan-Uddin Khan)

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Fig. 9. New Gourna Village. Dome of mosque, interior view.(Photo: Chant Avedissian/Aga Khan Award for Architecture,Geneva)

din), who is the architect's guest, meets the narratorin the prospective village and argues in defense ofits planner: "He's a great artist; look at this house,did you see the domed ceilings of the rooms? Didyou notice the windows . . . you won't see anythinglike them anywhere else in the world. It's all so Egyp-tian. You Egyptians should all live in houses like that.You're wrong in saying that you imitate us" (p. 32).This last argument, of course, raises the problem ofthe biased outlook of Westerners, as indeed it wasraised by the author, and adds to the story of thevillage a hidden dimension of cultural values and codesthat fall beyond the scope of this discussions

The points outlined above provoke the followingquestions: Is it at all possible to detach the dome fromthe archaic symbolic conventions that adhere to it-for example, by using it as a means of ventilation?This question is further complicated by the fact thatFathy also uses the dome to establish a link to Mam-

luk Egypt, thus adopting its medieval forms and sig-nificance. More specifically, could the architect real-ly expect to integrate the shaykh's domed tomb, theultimate signifier of popular Muslim culture-althoughit had been censored by orthodox Islam as a devia-tion from the norm-with the needs of the modelvillage? The question demonstrates that the tensionbetween different interpretations of visual-artistic sym-bolism-the dome, in this particular instance-accen-tuates the problem of the multivalence of artistic rep-resentation and brings up the larger question of theability of any artistic representation to reconstruct aculture. But beyond these theoretical issues, the storyof the dome, the planned village, and the author'sjourney to the mountain addresses real social ten-sions: between progress and tradition, between civili-zation and nature, and especially between a pater-nalistic experience and the authenticity and integrityof the village population.

From the outset, Hassan Fathy planned and for-mulated his ideas for the village on the basis of twoconcepts which put him in the position of the "know-ing mind": one was the effort to cultivate and edu-cate the fellah, rather blatantly expressed in the ar-chitect's desire "to build a village where the fellaheenwould follow the way of life that I would like themto."16 The second was to inculcate concepts of beau-ty and aesthetics, more apologetically formulated: "Ifthe architect is to offer any excuse for his arrogancein dictating what his fellow men shall live in, thatexcuse must be that he can surround them withbeauty." 7 These concepts found expression in hisdesign of the dwelling in the model village (figs. 10-11): "The household services-cooking, washing, andlatrines-were grouped around the central courtyard,which had a loggia where the family could eat. Alsoon the ground floor were the guest reception roomand the cattlesheds. Upstairs were the bedroom andthe fuel storage bin."18 In other words, Fathy pro-posed a distinct and functional spatial organization.

This defined and specific division of space is strik-ing, since, unlike the European dwelling, the interi-or spaces of the rural Muslim house-in Egypt, inour case-are not organized according to functionalcriteria. They are, rather, polyvalent spaces, viewedthrough a social, hierarchical, gender-defined, sea-sonal prism. It is not by chance that the rooms ofthese traditional dwellings are devoid of furniture suchas beds, chairs, and tables, which tend to define aspace and its function.'9

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Fig. 10. New Gourna Village. Courtyard of a house. (Photo:Christopher Little/Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Geneva)

We can learn more about the broader implicationsof an imposed architectural definition of domesticspaces in Upper Egypt from a concrete "historicmemory" of the period of the khedives in the earlynineteenth century, who commissioned French engi-neers to plan model villages (for example, Kafaral-Zayat in the Nile Delta, built in 1846). In their plansfor these buildings, the engineers divided the spaceup in meticulously measured units to allow the au-thorities to calculate the number of inhabitants andlivestock that each unit could contain. However, thefellahs, like the Old Gourna villagers, refused to moveto the villages assigned to them.

Henry Ayrout, a Jesuit stationed in rural Egypt inthe first part of the twentieth century, admits thatthese organized village houses had the appearance

Fig. 11. Idealized courtyard house facade. Gouache by HassanFathy, ca. 1950. (Courtesy Aga Khan Award for Architecture,Geneva)

of a "geometric jail," and asks rhetorically, "Is thefellah to be fitted to the house or the house to thefellah?" 2 0 The answer was clear: the villagers were tobe educated before the houses would be allotted tothem. "We must work from the inside out," he con-cludes.

However, anthropologists and scholars like Timo-thy Mitchell21 and Michael Gilsenan,2 2 claiming ob-jectivity by virtue of their scholarly vocation, regard-ed the building of these villages essentially as justanother manifestation of colonial domination of theEgyptian peasant population, undertaken in order "tosupervise, inscribe and enforce . . . the life of thevillage and peasant," and to exploit the fellahs as acontrolled work force producing cotton for the Eu-ropean market, and as army recruits.

We do not know if Fathy was aware of this anthro-pological analysis of the model villages of the nine-teenth century, or whether he, too, consciously soughtto supervise and dominate the Old Gourna villagersby the rational design of the new dwelling units heplanned for them. Several questions arise, however:did the architect really believe that he could forge anew culture by means of a building project? Did hepresume to sell the villagers an aesthetic? Did he notrealize the impossibility of creating a new village thatdid not respect the bonds linking the inhabitants totheir fathers and grandfathers, to their "old villagesquare," as it were-to their past? Did it not occur tohim that it might be wiser to preserve something ofthe accustomed clutter of forms dotting the moun-tainside in the Old Gourna village? Was he not rath-er more concerned with constructing a monumentto his own talent and imagination than with the real

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needs of the villagers, bolstering his creative ego atthe cost of obliterating their identity?

Unlike the architect, the author of al-Jabal readsthe situation with great sensitivity. The houses hedescribes are always those of Westerners or western-ized locals, and they are described according to thefunctional definition of the spatial units: the prose-cutor from Cairo, for example (who uses Atkinson'saftershave and wears woolens of exclusive Britishmake), lives in a house with two rooms and a darkkitchen, one room occupied by a bed (p. 22). Thehouse of the French-speaking engineer (i.e., the ar-chitect) boasts both a toilet and a bathroom, as wellas a spare room for guests (p. 37). The furniture issometimes described using attributes that turn anordinary object into the conveyor of a message: theengineer's table is laid (p. 37); the house of the kha-wajaiyya, the Frenchwoman from Paris, contains a"stylish settee" (p. 109), etc. The description of thesefictional houses is in striking contrast to that of theactual dwellings of the mountain villagers:

His cave was unadorned by paintings, but the walls weredecorated with attractive and colorful wickerwork plates.I saw his wife, dressed in black, and beside her a younggirl wearing an embroidered gallabiyeh, standing out-side the cave and watching us in silence. It containednothing but those wickerwork plates, a stone bed abovethe stove, a basket in a corner of the room and a largewooden chest of uncertain origin. My hosts and myselfsat on this chest while his wife prepared tea. I was startledby the sight of a little boy who entered the room ac-companied by a donkey which was greeted with muchado. The girl tied the donkey in a corner of the caveand hurried to bring it fodder. The donkey was like amember of the family, living among them, eating andsleeping under the same roof. My host looked fromthe donkey to me and started to explain that the engi-neer of the model village wanted them to keep theanimals away from their houses. He added excitedly,"All of us sleep with one eye open and keep the otheron the donkey or cow. How could I sleep with the don-key far away? Who'd watch over him? The engineer?By the life of Allah! The donkey would have been sto-len the very first night." (pp. 66-67)

The cave is not divided into defined spaces: the stonebed by the stove is not just for sleeping, but serves aswell for storing cooking utensils, and the wooden chestdoubles as a bench if the need arises. But above all,the cave dwellers and their animals live side by side.The principles of sanitation, hygiene, and "aesthet-

ics" set down by the engineer in his house plan thatled him to separate the bedrooms from the cattlesheds2 3 are challenged by the villagers' solidarity, theirfaithfulness to nature, and their integrity. This dichot-omy between "house" and "cave" is accentuated bythe words of the character who represents the au-thor, Hussein 'Ali:

He jumps to his feet to remove himself from the strangehouse. What does he care about houses? He is a cavedweller. Strange things go on in those houses. Thekhawajaiyya, the engineer, and the tourists live in houses.He detests the ceiling, the walls, the. chair, and the tablewith a pile of money on it, the bed in the other room.He must stop the dizzy feeling in his head, must goback to the mountain. (pp. 125-26)

Eventually Fathi Ghanim arrives at a conclusion notunlike Mitchell's criticism of the aforementioned"model villages" built a hundred years earlier: "Thegovernment acts like a police force seeking to evictthem forcibly from their caves to get rid of them ...its only concern is how to control them" (p. 156).

This discussion has pondered the definition of cul-tural authenticity through artistic representation-an architectural project for a model village-and anarrative about a fact-finding expedition to an au-tochthonous mountain community. However, this isnot only a theoretical, and certainly not an essential-ly phenomenological, discussion. It is anchored in aspecific cultural context and forms an inseparable partof the historical, political, and cultural history of twen-tieth-century Egypt. For what, in the final analysis,does Islamic culture have to do with such conceptsas authenticity, the fellah villager viewed as a "noblesavage," and "model villages" designed for "individu-al comfort"-those household words of Western dis-course in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Itis well known that for 1,200 years, Islamic art andliterature dealt exclusively with the khassa, i.e., withrulers and courtiers, and that it was only in the twen-tieth century that the needs of the 'amma, the com-mon people, the people of the Rif and the fellahs,were addressed as well.

Preoccupation with the fellah is one manifestationof the attempt to define the Egyptian national iden-tity in the course of the twentieth century, and espe-cially in the wake of the individual's crumbling iden-tification with the local structure (the village, theethnic community, the nuclear and extended fami-

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ly), which traditionally afforded him a sense of be-longing and pride. During World War I there werealready contacts between the rural and urban popu-lation, when the rulers "descended to the people" ofEgypt to solicit political support, and the fellah be-came the object of sociopolitical agreements and fig-ured in fiction and in the writings of political lead-ers and intellectuals (see, for example, Salame Musaand Ahmad Amin) as "the crowning glory and secretweapon of Egypt, like a sole truth in the world re-maining unchanged for six thousand years."2 4 Butthe real change in the way the intelligentsia referredto the Egyptian Rif and its problems-a change whichalso brought far-reaching agrarian reforms in itswake-came with the 1952July Revolution of the FreeOfficers led by Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser. Those whowanted to bring a new message to Egypt inscribedon their banners the liberation of the fellahs fromthe landowners and from their ignorance, declaring,"The village is Egypt, with its Arab population, its rootsand its simplicity." In other words, the people arethe fellahs, the indigenous population of the NileValley, rather than the educated, Westernized citi-zens: the "Egyptification" of Egypt will be effectednot only through the expulsion of foreigners and theeradication of their world view but, first and fore-most, through the fellah. For the fellah representsthe people-the primeval, the authentic, the intui-tive and spontaneous.

The narrative about the confrontation between thearchitect and the author on all its levels tries to fur-nish a combined artistic and documentary vision ofthe basic components of Egyptian society and how itgrapples with problems of identity. However, it seemsto me that this apparent confrontation is nothing buta mirror image of that same paternalistic, even "Ori-entalist," pretentiousness that divulges the othernessof both the architect and the author. For if the ar-chitect in effect silences the voice of the mountainvillagers, the author aims-but in effect fails-to claimit.

The architect designs the village according to therules and to his own "enlightened and reformist"outlook. The author, in turn, tries to present the crudereality of the Egyptian village as authentically as pos-sible, interspersing literary Arabic with the colloqui-alisms of Sa'id, the dialect of Upper Egypt spoken bythe Old Gourna villagers. 2 5 He is not entirely authenticfrom the perspective of literary criticism, however:in point of fact, he largely complies with the pro-

grammatic genre of the village novel, fifty-two of whichwere written in Egypt between the 1920's and the1980's.26 That appears to be the reason why FathiGhanim employs the dialectic of a "foregone conclu-sion" to the resistance of the Old Gourna villagers,assuming the role of a social theoretician of the re-formist school. Furthermore, the use of fiction subli-mates the social issue. To my mind, the device ofpresenting all the characters through the eyes of theprotagonist, who combines the roles of narrator andomniscient author, obscures or misses the real dra-ma unfolding between the villagers and the archi-tect.

The author returns to Cairo in the end. "I am notone with the village and it only remains for me to goback to the world I came from. The truths of myweariness, of the pain in my ribs, and my decliningstrength wail within me. I must return to my world"(p. 153). The author may have undertaken an imag-inatory journey, but the Old Gourna villagers-theauthentic, intuitive mountain dwellers, the proudobject of the revolution-remain where and as theywere, poor, ignorant, and trapped in their fate.

Incidentally, I recently learned from the Inter-net that the Government of Egypt intends to build anew village for the Gourna population.

Tel Aviv UniversityTel Aviv, Israel

NOTES

Author's note: I wish to thank my colleagues Dr. Tamar Ya'acobi,Professor Israel Gershoni, Dr. Ami Elad, and Dr. MosheZuckermann for the many discussions that led to my writingthis paper.

1. Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Ru-ral Egypt (Chicago, 1973). The book was originally publishedin Cairo in 1969 under the title, Gourna: A Tale of Two Vil-lages; see also Construire avec le peuple: histoire d'un villaged'Egypte, Gourna, 2 vols. (Paris, 1977-78).

2. Ibid., pp. 39-40; and see also James Steele, Hassan Fathy(London, 1985), pp. 74-75.

3. See, e.g., the list of awards bestowed on him, in J. M.Richards, Ismail Serageldin, Darl Rastorfer, Hassan Fathy(London, 1985), p. 170.

4. Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, pp. 5-7, 33, 41, 55; Steele,Hassan Fathy, pp. 45-47.

5. Ibid., fig. 66, plan of New Gourna. The village was initiallyplanned for about 900 families, but Fathy only managed tocomplete dwelling units for some 130 families, coveringone fifth of the designated area.

6. See Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, p. 58, and GuillermoMaluenda Felipe pich-Aguilera, "Hassan Fathy-Beyond the

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Nile," Mimar 33 (1989): 36. The badana is a tightly knitunit of ten to twenty extended families with a strong senseof group allegiance. They live in adjoining houses sharinga communal way of life. In a certain sense the badana con-stitutes the basic socioeconomic unit of the peasant.

7. The qa'a is a reception hall, the principal structure of aMamluk residence; see, for further explanation, DorisBehrens Abouseif, Islamic Architecture in Cairo, An Introduc-tion (Leiden, 1989), p.' 3 5 .

8. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City-Historic Myth,Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance," in Interna-tional Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 19 (1987): 155-76.

9. Fathi Ghanim, al-Jabal (The Mountain) (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal,1965); first published in serial form in the weekly Ruz-al-Yusufin 1958, then as a book in 1959.

10. For Fathy's preoccupation with problems of ventilation, seehis book, Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture: Prin-ciples and Examples with Reference to Hot Arid Climates (Chi-cago and London, 1986). A claustra is a kind of mud-brickmashrabiyya acting as a natural air filter (Behrens-Abousief,Islamic Architecture, p. 36). For the way the malqaf, or airshaft, functioned, see David A. King, "Architecture andAstronomy: The Ventilators of Medieval Cairo and TheirSecrets," inJournal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984):97-133. King's observation that the type of malqaf preva-lent in medieval Cairo is not seen at all in the twentiethcentury (pp. 99-100) highlights Fathy's programmatic useof medieval elements.

11. Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, p. 74. It is also important tomention the structural nature of the dome, which was con-structed without using scaffolding and was thus able to yieldthe needed span for the prayer hall-an inexpensive alter-native to timber.

12. DaluJones, "The Elements of Decoration: Surface, Patternsand Light," in George Michell, ed., Architecture of the IslamicWorld (London, 1978), p. 173.

13. Caroline Williams, Islamic Monuments in Cairo (Cairo, 1993),points out that, despite the fact that the house of Gamalal-Din al-Dhahabi is an example of a seventeenth-centurymansion, it was built in the Mamluk style (p. 161). TheSuhaymi house was built in 1648 (see ibid., pp. 199-202).

14. Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, p. 57.

15. For example, when the Westerner-foreigner not only equatesthe Oriental with the exotic but also seeks to perpetuatethis quality. One instance of this phenomenon is theFrenchwoman, referred to as the khwajaiyya, who claims(through the author-narrator) that "she likes the primitivepeople and wants them to remain primitive so as not tobecome corrupted" (p. 36). The term khwajaiyya is usedtoday in Egypt to refer to a European (khwaja). In MamlukEgypt it referred to a pious functionary.

16. Fathy, Architecture for the Poor,. p. 1.17. Ibid., p. 72. It is of interest to note that Hassan Fathy stud-

ied in the Architecture Section of the School of Engineer-ing at Giza, whose model curriculum was established andpromoted by the cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

18. Ibid., p. 93.19. Guy T. Petherbridge, "The House and Society," in George

Michell, ed., Architecture of the Islamic World (London, 1978),p. 199.

20. Henry Habib Ayrout, The Egyptian Peasant, trans. John AldenWilliams, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963; 1st ed. 1938),pp. 128-30.

21. Timothy Mitchell, ColonisingEgypt (Cambridge, 1988), pp.34-95. See also P. Bourdieu, "The Kabyle House or theWorld Reversed," in Algeria 1960 (Paris, 1972; English trans.,Cambridge, 1979), pp. 133-53.

22. Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society inthe Modern Middle East (London, 1990), pp. 164-91.

23. See Fathy's disdainful and cynical remarks about the fellahsin his book: ". . . for he will say that if a baby dies he canmake plenty more free but if a cow dies he must pay toreplace it" (Architecture for the Poor, p. 92).

24. I. Gershoni, Egypt Between Distinctiveness and Unity: The Searchfor National Identity 1919-1948 [in Hebrew], pp. 179-80.

25. Itamar Even-Zohar, "The Nature and Functionalization ofthe Language of Literature under Diglossia" [in Hebrew],Hasifrut: Quarterly for the Study of Literature 2 (1967-1971):286-302 (Hebrew text); 443-46 (English summary).

26. Ami Elad, "The Village Novel in Modern Egyptian Litera-ture" [in Hebrew], Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, Jerusa-lem, 1985, pp. 161-70; see also Ami Elad, "Ideology andStructure in Fathi Ghanim's al-Jabal," in Journal of ArabicLiterature 20 (1990): 168-86.

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