Last Tuesday, fire broke out in the 19th century palace which houses the Shura (Consultative) Council, the upper house of Egypt’s parliament. Flames burst through the windows as dozens of fire trucks hosed down the building and two helicopters scooped water from the Nile River to douse the blaze. The fire started on the top floor of the three-storey building, and spread to the lower floors, raging on for 11 full hours until the entire building was burnt.
Until Watani went to press there was no official word on the cause. Authorities ruled out terrorism, and said that an electrical short-circuit had likely sparked the fire. At least 16 workers and firefighters were hospitalised for smoke inhalation,
The Shura Council is made up of 264 members of whom 176 are directly elected and 88 appointed by the president, and is a largely symbolic body that can only advise on legislation.
Parliament is currently in summer recess.
Half a century ago
The fire which ravaged the Shura Council building last Tuesday brought to mind other fires which had devastated Cairo in its recent history, conspicuously the great fire of January 1952.
At that time, Egypt was a monarchy. The royalty had become synonymous with scandal and moral decadence. British domination was intolerable, and the people’s party, the Wafd—returning to power with an overwhelming parliamentary majority in 1950—was about to declare Egypt’s unilateral abrogation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. Armed struggle was launched in the Canal Zone, and radical social movements including the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists had begun to outflank the increasingly conservative Wafd. A new generation of army officers, seething with nationalist sentiment and calling themselves the Free Officers, held secret meetings and laboured to hatch what must have seemed a highly unlikely conspiracy. On 25 January 1952, British occupation forces in Suez attacked the Ismailiya barracks, staffed and heroically defended by a small and lightly armed contingent of the Egyptian army. Fifty Egyptians were killed. The following day, soldiers from the Abbasiya barracks in Cairo, demanding arms to fight the British, marched to the university, where they were joined by thousands of students. Tragically, what began as a great patriotic demonstration soon degenerated into the Cairo Fire.
Fire blazed through the streets of Cairo, starting in Opera Square and spreading through its Downtown streets. Department stores, hotels, cinemas, restaurants, clubs, and houses were torched. Any institution thought to be dominated by British or other foreign interests was ruined. The Shepheard’s Hotel, one of the city’s most famous landmarks was also destroyed. Meanwhile King Farouq was inviting army and police leaders to celebrate the birth of his only son and heir to the throne.
The outcome was that the king declared martial law, the Wafd government was thrown out and the stage was set for the Free Officers to radically transform the face of the country through the 23 July 1952 Revolution which erupted later that year.
The Opera House
Less than twenty years later, on the dawn of the 20 October 1971, the Cairo Opera House went up in flames. It had been built in the late 1860s by Egypt’s governor Khedive Ismaïl Pasha who was then preparing for an event that was destined to change the history of maritime trade in the entire world. The Suez Canal was ready for official inauguration and the French-educated Ismaïl, who was determined to carry Egypt into a modern era of European civilisation, ordered the building of a grand opera house in Cairo, to be modelled after the Paris Opera. It was thus that, at the then princely sum of LE 160,000, the Cairo Opera House came into being.
On 29 November 1869, the Opera House opened with Verdi’s Rigoletto — in lieu of the commissioned and at that point unfinished Aida—in honour of the royal guests Ismaïl had invited for the Suez Canal’s inauguration. The original Opera House was called the Khedival Opera, which was later changed to the Royal Opera. Following the 1952-Revolution the name was again changed to the simple ‘Opera House’. In 1971, the Opera House fell prey to the flames of a raging fire accidentally sparked by an electrical fault in the wiring, and burnt to the ground. It was a national disaster; Egyptians were heartbroken. Out of the vast store of musical and stage accoutrements, pictures and portraits by great painters, hundreds of musical notes and instruments, nothing was saved apart from the statues of Welfare and Art Renaissance by sculptor Mohammed Hassan.
Gloating
While many Egyptians felt the recent fire was a great loss in national heritage, many others appeared to gloat over what they saw as the fall of a stronghold of the political regime.
People stood indifferently watching the fire consume the timbre-built building, some capturing images of the event on their cell-phone cameras. Remarks and comments ranged between the sarcastic, the gleeful, and the bitter. And the situation was no different with the bloggers.
Ahmed Hamdy, a student, said the fire and the inability of the fire fighters to contain it came as no surprise. “Nothing in Egypt is properly planned; everything is haphazard. An important part of Egypt’s history has been lost to grass negligence,’ he said.
A passerby said it was a pity Parliament was in recess. “The prime minister, ministers, officials, and MPs should have all been in there [while the fire raged on],” he said. “The country would have been all the better for it.”
Others said the fire was Heaven’s revenge against the oppressors, while the young woman Heba Ibrahim said: “I don’t care for the fire or the building; we already have a complicated problem with high prices.”
In his daily column in al-Masry al-Youm, columnist Hamdy Rizq bitterly commented on the gloating. He wrote that he spent the evening following satellite channels’ coverage of the fire while sitting on a sidewalk café and listening people’s comments. Only a few felt the loss. “It was one of the saddest moments in my life,” he wrote. “Whatever happened to the Egyptians? I was heartbroken.”
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