Al Azhar Park



In the very heart of Cairo’s noisy and heavily polluted center, an unexpected oasis has been created, as is featured in this month’s issue of Saudi Aramco World, a daring green experiment linked to Cairo’s past. It is located on the site of a vast rubbish dump where for more than five hundred years residents had tossed away their garbage. The park is a marvelous gem, an Islamic garden, and Cairo’s green lung. The Aga Khan, Imam of the Ismaili muslims with family ties to Cairo’s Fatimid Dynasty of the 10th century, has been a main sponsor of the project. Work commenced in 1997, and in 2004 the park received its first visitors.

It is amazing to read what the team of Egyptian, French, Italian, and American architects, engineers, and landscape specialists and horticulturalists uncovered when digging in the thirty meters of rubble.





Comments

Anonymous said…
I've been there ..

It's such a nice place
9 August 2008 at 19:54
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lady Shatita

Image
In order to learn more about Shi’a Islam and the piety of ordinary people it would have been most helpful to visit at least some of the plenty of Emamzadehs (holy sites) all over Iran. So, it was a most welcome opportunity and, in fact, great honor when my Kuwaiti friends invited me to accompany them on their several bus trips in Khorasan on the occasion of their 2006 pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mashhad. Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian Empires each embraced half of the then known world when they climaxed. And even when Iran was under the reign of Seleucids, Arabs, Seljuks, or Mongols, the Iranians imprinted their lifestyle and culture on the non-welcome invaders, who in any sense immensely benefited. So, the austere new religion Islam, which replaced Iran’s state religion Zoroastrianism, was fundamentally reorganized, and, as I see it as an outsider, filled with life. The rapid and shocking decline of the Sasanid Empire at the end of a century-long fight with Byzantium, and the
Read more

The Cassin Collection at Auction (IV) The King of the Yellow Rug Group

Image
  According to his Anatolian kilim opus (p. 8), Cassin had found this gorgeous yellow ground rug fragment in 1981 when traveling on his own in Anatolia. He had left his German travel companion from Nuremberg in Istanbul as, according to Jack, the guy wasn't able to behave properly. The purpose of the trip was twofold: to find one or two collectibles in Turkey and "to do some first-hand research into early archetype rugs and kelim." As to the former, he only found one rug worth to take home (the above) but no kilim. Note that Jack always emphasized that the small collection of archetype kilims from Anatolia was already in his possession before he went to Turkey. At least seven of these kilims are currently at auction in Philadelphia (see my previous post ). The fragment is what he calls the "King of the yellow rug group". As far as we know, Cassin kept this rug for almost forty years and never even considered it for sale. I am quite sure that he did not s
Read more

Persianization

Image
Kuwait’s Arab Times had attracted my attention to Esfahan’s gorgeous Great Mosque in an article in 2003. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find so far a webpage of the article which praised the wonders of Iran’s largest mosque and one of the most significant and finest buildings of the Islamic world. I visited the site the first time at my second trip to Esfahan in late spring of 2004. I took some pictures in the vast courtyard, soaked the peaceful atmosphere there, and watched the few visitors from Iran and elsewhere. I had forgotten about the many details of the article and faintly had read some of the notes in my travel guide. My second visit in late 2007 was driven by scientific interest. I had recently posted (at Freelance ) my rather amateurish studies and thoughts about a suggested ‘conceptual breakthrough’ in Islamic architecture and art in the late 15th century, i.e., quasi-crystalline tessellations, which had led to world-wide attention due to its publication in the Science magazine
Read more