The Fate of Twenty-First Century Cairo

摘要

Cairo both beguiled and shocked the fourteenth-century sociologist Ibn Khaldoun. 'He who has not seen Cairo', he wrote, 'does not know the grandeur of Islam ... the thronging-place of nations and the anthill of the human race'. Today, Egypt's political development, or, depending upon one's view, regression, is mirrored in its architecture. Its royalist culture and capitalist economy saw elegant planning until the revolution of the Young Officers in 1952.