In a rare interview, His Highness the Aga Khan describes his global approach to helping Islamic communities help themselves, while also restoring their past heritage
By Anna Somers Cocks for The Art Newspaper
This article was originally published in May 2005, The Art Newspaper, Issue 158.
Last month, a 30-hectare park in the centre of Cairo was inaugurated by the Aga Khan and Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the Egyptian president. It stands high over the city so on a clear day you can see the pyramids, and breezes ruffle its palm trees. You look down on the 12th-century city wall that runs for a kilometre and a half from Saladin’s great citadel. Crushed up against it is Darb Al-Ahmar, the oldest part of Cairo, a dense network of ramshackle streets that includes 50 monuments, from exquisitely detailed 14th-century mosques to the last of the whirling dervishes’ theatres in Egypt. The poorest of the poor live here; the houses—and most of the monuments—are so badly maintained that some of them are downright dangerous.
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