Nezar AlSayyad

On his book Cairo: Histories of a City

Cover Interview of August 30, 2011

In a nutshell

Cairo is composed of twelve vignettes, arranged by place rather than time. Each vignette carries stories told through the place’s built environment. Each edifice has been dictated by the environment (for example, the changing course of the Nile), the needs of the people (an increase in population has created a need for a new marketplace), and the grandiosity of the ruler sponsoring the edifice. Each addition or adaptation to the built environment tells a story of the people who lived in that time, and the ones before it. Many of Cairo’s architectural features have been witness to a thousand years of changes.

The premise of the book is that the history of a city is mainly that of specific individuals, places, and events. I begin each chapter at a specific place that best represents a period in Cairo’s history, and then proceed to describe that time period and the lives of specific individuals, narrating important events, and citing the reports of specific travelers and local residents, all the while attempting to evoke a sense of the evolving spatial order of the city.

history / literature / architecture / urbanity / egypt / abdel-jawad family / cairo / fatimid city / mafouz naguib / memphis city /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009