Architecture, politics, and backwardness…a new vision

Urbanism and Politics: An Urbanist Perspective for Explaining Underdevelopment is a new book by my friend Dr. Mamoun Fandi. He sent it to me from London and I read it in two days because it is an unconventional book and raises new questions on old topics in a new way and in easy and profound language about urbanism and politics. It also shares with the reader insights into his fleeting and complex biography at the beginning. From his village of Kom El-Dabaa, the center of his critics, from Qata Governorate in Upper Egypt, to Assiut and Cairo, and from there to graduate studies in the United States, and finally visiting Europe and living and writing from London; He now works as director of the Middle East and Gulf Security Program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, not to mention writing a monthly article in the widely circulated Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.

The book begins with a dedication to his nephew Ahmed, who died young, and it is not a fleeting dedication, because the author did not abandon his Upper Egypt and family origins despite his travels and his life in the diaspora. Rather, he does not feel intimidated by the center and the big cities, meaning that he does not suffer from the Khawaja complex like many Arab youth when they travel to capitals and universities. Western and Western modernity fascinates them. This is clear in the pages of the book, despite the multiplicity of topics and applications.

The title of the book is interesting: Architecture, Politics, and Underdevelopment…an urban perspective to explain underdevelopment. Urban development and the changes that occur over the years are an expression and manifestation of deeper social, cultural and political changes. Urbanism is a symbolic image, writings, and a anthropomorphic interpretation of the essence of society. That’s why Dr. says: Fendi: “I adopt an urban perspective to explain what happened to Egyptian society during the last half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new century,” p. 11. In other words, the writer adopts an approach in which urbanism is the concept from which the reader enters his book.

But understanding urbanism and city planning is read from multiple methodological angles, including architecture, geography, politics, and anthropology, not to mention the intersection of the religious and symbolic sacred with the political and social. He says that the idea of ​​the book came after his life experience in Western Europe and America in particular, and his personal impressions on hidden and dark aspects of contemporary Egyptian life, from rural Egypt to its cities. He says that most studies on society are not similar to his life and generation, and that the history, culture and politics of society cannot be understood outside the context of architecture and city planning and their relationship to the humanities and anthropology. The focus here is on the person’s relationship with the street, the buildings, and the city and its reflection on his vision of himself and the world.

Here we find a double criticism of studies that focus on Cairo (Egypt) and neglect the peripheries such as Upper Egypt, especially the southern Upper Egypt, but also the shortcomings of Western and Arab social and political studies that are deeply specialized. Not to mention the importance of the oral and mythological symbolic heritage, the intersection of the religious and the political in the symbols of architecture and city planning, and the deconstruction of these symbols to understand their meanings about the multiple and complex identity now.

Dr. says Fendi said that the idea of ​​architecture and anthropological symbols began in 1978 when he began his first journey from west Luxor and his village of Kom El-Dabaa by train to Cairo. He sees this journey as having symbolic and philosophical dimensions. “A person traveling by train from Luxor, heading towards the north and towards Surat Al-Hakam in Cairo, should not forget that the religious and the secular represent two parallel lines that do not meet except when they touch the circumference of the center circle in Cairo,” p. 41.

On page 52, he adds a second note that expresses the basic idea and interpretation of the book: “What is striking when riding the train from Luxor towards Cairo is that the importance of the governorate increases the further north you go. As the importance of the governorate increases, the importance of the guardian increases. Meaning that Luxor is smaller than Qena, and the shrine of Sidi Abd al-Rahim al-Qenawi in Qena is more important than the shrine of Sidi Abu al-Hajjaj in Luxor, and so on until Cairo reaches the shrine of our master Hussein.

Dr.. Fendi presents this new vision of the intersection of architecture with anthropology and politics and relies on the ideas of the scholar Ibn Khaldun and the late Egyptian architectural historian Hassan Fathi, but adds new applications to understanding the structure of society and its relationship with the modern state from a comparative perspective, especially the vision of the marginalized and forgotten parties of the center and the state. The book concludes with results and applications that deserve attention and thought because they are new and unusual in contemporary Egyptian studies, whether in Arabic or in Anglo-American studies. For example, Dr. Fandi says that there is an overlap between the religious and the sacred and the political, and that the calendar, for example, is a triple Pharaonic, Hijri, and Gregorian, and that dress reflects the pluralism of Egyptian identity, where the Saidi peasant dress is the robe and turban, next to the fez (Ottoman) and the European dress of the Effendi category. How modern dress is official government work dress, while at home it is traditional Egyptian dress. We read on page 160, “The borders of the state are temporal. Al-Saidi belongs to the state in his clothes for seven hours a day, and beyond that he is another world with tribal and regional circles.” In another reference to Al-Masry’s relationship with modernity, he says, “The tourist comes to our world to enjoy the old, and we go to his world to enjoy the modern.” That is, we. Part of the other world and vice versa. This is not only true for understanding ourselves, but also because the Western other cannot understand himself in isolation from us and the world.

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