Travel – harryjohnstone

The Herbalists of the Souq El Blat

Tawfiq Ben Yacoub in his shop in the Souq El Blat

“The Souq El Blat is the heartbeat of the medina,” proclaims Mourad Boughanmi, a medicinal herb seller speaking from his shop in this historic quarter of Tunis. Indeed, for centuries, its herbs have sustained the bodies of people living here. Bundles of wild thyme, sage, poppy, garlic and eucalyptus have lined the walls of this shadowy Souq for at least 700 years.

Since Covid-19 entered Tunisia last year, some herbalists say demand for plant medicine has grown, with greater numbers wanting to strengthen their immune systems naturally. But customs are changing, and without any state support, this trade has become endangered.

Five thousand years ago the Sumerians of Mesopotamia documented the health-enhancing properties of wild plants. These early texts articulated the ancient practice of herbalism, where ecology, biology and chemistry meet. In the ensuing millennia, medicinal herbs have been picked and prepared to help with a number of different ailments. In the cavernous shops of the Souq El Blat, this profession lives on.

Down the Rue Bacha Hamba, Tawfiq Ben Yacoub, a herb dealer with a passion for art, history and music has a shop with the chaotic feel of an artist’s studio; it is filled with flasks, bottles, paintings, bags of old herbs and the sweet smell of incense. He tells his story over the quiet fuzz of a radio and bleating mopeds passing by.

As a boy, he would hike with his Libyan father in the green mountains near Benghazi, where he learnt about medicinal herbs. He describes the 10th century Tunisian physician, Ibn al Jazzar, advancing herbal medicine in Tunisia and across North Africa. After the Islamic Golden Age, Ben Yacoub believes medicine stagnated across the Muslim world compared with Europe due to weaker institutionalised scholarship. “We lost knowledge of this science when we lost the scripts,” he says. “Today our children learn about Ibn al Jazzar, but as history rather than for scientific training.”

Nearby, in his shop next to the Khilwiya Bilhassan mosque, Chowki El Foutt is another herb dealer who sees his vocation as a strand in Tunisia’s rich and complex history. El Foutt says it was the Ottoman Turks who really established herbal medicine here, from the 16th to the 18th centuries. He views his practice as part of Tunisia’s patrimoine. “Just as we have heritage in clothes and language, so we have herbal medicine. It is something we need to keep.”

Yet with the rise of pharmaceutical medicine, these herbalists can appear artisanal. They also lack outside support. When I ask Mourad Boughanmi whether he receives state aid, he creases with laughter. “We get zero help”, he said. Several others say the same thing.

Being marginalised in this way is frustrating for Samir Ben Youssef. A herbal doctor specialized in aiding women’s fertility, Ben Youssef has inherited his father’s profession and treated patients in the Souq El Blat for 20 years.

“People think herbalists are charlatans”, says Ben Youssef, shaking his head. He is trying to resist this labelling by ensuring his results are assessed at clinical laboratories through CBEU tests and other standard, scientific procedures. While using these modern practices, the basis of his learning reaches back as far as the great 11th century Persian polymath, Ibn Sena.

“100 years ago, this whole road as far as the mosque (Zaytuna) was lined with herboristes”, says Ben Youssef. “There was a whole chain of people who went to gather the herbs. But young people today don’t want to work in this trade anymore. And the elders don’t want to pass on their knowledge,” he says. “So it will disappear.”

Though there are some younger herbalists, like Yacine Ben Moussa, who believe that modernity offers advantages. “Before I only worked with herbs that grow in Tunisia,” he says. “Now, with the internet, I can google things and order foreign herbs online.” Among the shelves of plant medicines, which include cloves, anise and chia seeds, he shows me a framed certificate of phytotherapy from an academy of complementary medicine. Clearly there are institutions of learning.

As Samir Ben Youssef intimated, however, the reputation of herb dealers may present a problem. They are associated with black magic. Many of the shops sell turtle carcasses as lucky charms. Some allegedly sell crushed iguana and hedgehog carcasses. One gave me a bag of cowrie shells and black nigella seeds to ward off the evil eye.

These customs might confirm suspicions that herbalism is hogwash, but it’s worth seeing them in context. Despite its secularism, spiritual belief still heavily influences Tunisian society. In medicine, while Tunisia has largely adopted western practices, the relationship between spirituality and healing lives on. This broader view of medicine – which herbalists span – has arguably helped to sustain a more holistic, intuitive approach to healing.

As I leave the medina, taking in the smells of leather and jasmine scent from a succession of cavernous shops, I pass the crumbling main entrance of 7th century Al Zaytuna mosque. My head is alive with thoughts of shamans, Ibn Sena and the madrassas, and the people once employed in gathering the plants and seeds to heal the sick.

I reflect on a part of herbalism that modern medicine – like many modern things – has lost, in being processed and abstracted: the relationship between things. In this Souq, a person suffering from diabetes can see and touch and smell the wormwood that they hope will heal their illness. Through the herbalist, they can learn about its anti-diabetic effects, and that it grows among the craggy rocks of the southern Jebel Oust mountains.

This is important: it reminds people that most medicine is essentially drawn from the living or organic world, a basic fact that may be lost to many consumers of western medication. This is not to discredit western medicine at all – its importance, for billions of people, is undeniable. But it is to remember that humbling, sacred aspect of medicine; that much of what heals us can be found in nature.

An edited version of this article was published in The Guardian

The Jewellers of Jaipur

Sir, want precious stones?” a man asks me, quietly. I am on the Johari Bazaar, one of Jaipur’s most notable thoroughfares, a straight colonnade screened above by the facades of adjoining houses. Everything is painted orange, terracotta and burnt pink. The man wears white shalwar kameez, and an air of indifference. He unfolds white paper, revealing colourful stones. “Emeralds, sapphires, rubies …” he says. He is among one of several groups of men gathered in this area; they’re local dealers, discussing prices. The avenue, whose name means gem shop road, is lined with dozens of shops displaying magnificent necklaces, bracelets and rings.

My encounter reveals something of why the “Pink City”, in northern India, has just been named a Unesco world heritage site. Jaipur was selected partly on the basis of its urban plan, featuring colonnaded streets and public squares called chaupurs. The city also contains architectural wonders: the City Palace, Amber Fort, and Water Palace among them. Walking past the pink sandstone Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Winds), Jaipur’s five-storey honeycomb-like wall of 50-odd protruding windows with latticework frames, miniature cupolas and painted motifs, is a breathtaking experience.

Along with these ceremonial court buildings, Jaipur was constructed for commerce. As Unesco states, the city was “designed to be a commercial capital”. Today, dealers and vendors animate the streets. And in back alleys and second-storey workshops, curious visitors will find artisans working on ornamental crafts. Unesco recognises how Jaipur “has maintained its local commercial, artisanal and cooperative traditions to this day”.

Jaipur is famous for its wood-block printing, tailoring, carpets, wood and metalwork. There are many contemporary boutiques, such as Teatro Dhora, selling elegant clothes, men’s handkerchiefs, notepads, leather handbags and more at (relatively) affordable prices. But it is in jewellery, in particular, where the city has historically excelled.

After founding Jaipur in 1727, Jai Singh II is said to have organised a procession through the city where local crowds threw precious stones over him and his entourage. He was infatuated with jewels. Under his patronage, Jaipur started to become a centre for jewellery, attracting artisans and traders from afar. Today, the city is home to hundreds of thousands of jewellers and dealers.

“People here are obsessed with jewellery,” says Akshat Ghiya, owner and creative head of Tallin Jewels, a boutiquebrand whose workshop is on the Johari Bazaar. “It’s almost a compulsion here for people to buy jewellery every few months. Ever since the Raja [Jai Singh II], jewellery has flourished here. Jaipur has become the largest stone-cutting centre in the world.”

By talking to dealers, visitors can find opportunities to meet jewellers, like Narenda, who I chat with in his second-floor workshop off the Chand Pol Bazaar. He examines a jewel on his workspace, while sitting cross-legged on the floor. “When I go to temples, I get a lot of ideas,” he says. On the wall is a framed picture of three Hindu gods, draped with a garland of orange marigolds. Below, at street level, as ever, there’s the din of motorbikes and rickshaws. Through the window, the Nahargarh Fort is faintly visible on the hills beyond the city.

Narenda works in the traditional Kundan Meena style. Kundan jewellery is unusual in using wax within the gold or silver frame, as well as incorporating glass and painted illustrations, of white, green, red or blue floral motifs. The results have an ethnic feel but when used in an ensemble of necklace, tiara, earrings and rings, Kundan can look bling. Which can be the point: the style is popular among wealthy brides from Mumbai and Delhi.

Kundan Meena jewellery is intricate and inlaid with enamel in a variety of colours

While rich Indians visit Jaipur for its gems, the city offers jewellery for anyone. Backpackers and tourists can find inexpensive, quality pieces in dozens of shops around the city. It requires patience and a discerning eye.

Visitors can develop their knowledge of Indian jewellery at the Amrapali museum on Ashok Marg Road. It is an extraordinary collection of jewellery, displayed over two small floors. A mesmerising foot-long, 19th-century gold braid, from Tamil Nadu, engraved with Hindu gods and goddesses, is just one of hundreds of spectacular pieces.

Amrapali also manufactures jewellery at scale. Its 1,500 “factory -floor” jewellers produce pieces that are mostly sold to other companies at a range of price points. The goldsmiths tend to come from Bengal, while stone-cutters have historically come from local Muslim communities, whereas gem-traders are Marwaris, a Rajasthani caste. Most of Jaipur’s jewellers are men, though efforts are being made to employ more women. Tarang Arora, the son of one of the founders of Amrapali, stresses that the company is committed to ensuring its workers’ welfare.

To some extent, the Amrapali factory and several others in Jaipur are trying to compete with Chinese industry. When it comes to economies of scale, though, Jaipur would probably lose out. Plus, it may make more sense for the city’s jewellery producers to associate themselves with Jaipur’s “brand” as a hub for handicrafts.

This is where Tallin, Akshat Ghiya’s workshop-boutique, is well positioned. The company employs around 20 artisans. The jewellers work in an upper-floor space along the Johari Bazaar. Tallin makes traditional Rajasthani and art deco-inspired pieces. Anyone can visit to see the craftsmen in action and pour over their glittering pieces in Akshat’s office-showroom.

Such an intimate environment must be conducive to good craftsmanship. One of Tallin’s jewellers, Srikant, talks about how his trade has allowed him to connect to his artistry, his gift, even. He adds that for him and his fellow Bengalis, crafting jewellery offers something else: “It brings us honour.” No doubt this is something the people at Unesco would like to see preserved.

This article was published in the Guardian

All photography by Christopher Wilton-Steer

The Artisans of the Walled City of Lahore

Perched outside his workshop in Lahore’s Walled City, Mohamed Tahir plays a harmonium while watching the passing melee. The melancholy sounds of the instrument are barely audible over the din of motorbikes and wheel cutters, but still they evoke something of Lahore’s history, a world that lives on beneath the dust and frantic rhythms of everyday life.

“The piano and harmonium were brought here by the Britishers, but drum-making began during the Mughal period,” Tahir says. Wrapped in a black cotton shawl, the elderly man has been making musical instruments on this street for over 70 years.

Like many artisans in the Walled City, Tahir’s skills have been passed down the generations, surviving the turns of history that have ruptured this region. With changing traditions and market competition, though, Lahore’s craftsmen face an uncertain future. Yet some initiatives are offering these artisans an opportunity to craft a profound transformation upon the city.

There are hopes that the work of these craftsmen and women will revive a city that has been passed over by tourists for decades. Lahore rivals Delhi for its heritage, yet receives a tenth of the visitors. Plus it’s a relatively short drive from the city to the country’s breathtaking northern mountain ranges. For travellers, the lure of the city has been overshadowed, it seems, by the drama of Pakistan’s history.

When Pakistan became a sovereign state in 1947, Mohamed Tahir’s family moved from Amritsar, in India, to Lahore, inside the new Pakistani border. The period is known as Partition. Seven million Hindus and Sikhs left for India. Over 10 million Muslims crossed into Pakistan, including many of Lahore’s current artisans. Theirs is a lineage disrupted by politics, whose continuity lies in their craft. Though in the upheaval surrounding the new state of Pakistan, a great deal was lost.

For over a thousand years, Lahore thrived by welcoming all sorts; Chinese travellers, Sufi saints from Ghazni, Portuguese priests, Italian painters and Armenian ironsmiths. Lahore reached the height of its splendour during the Mughal period, from 16th to 18th centuries. The Emperors of this time – Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurungzeb – were generous patrons of the arts and crafts. The most impressive Mughal architecture, such as the Lahore Fort and Badshahi Mosque, borrowed from Islamic, Persian and Hindu traditions. The Walled City became Lahore’s commercial heart: a dense maze of alleyways and markets, whose karkhana (workshops) thronged with thousands of weavers, ironsmiths, masons, miniaturists, astrolabe makers, jewelers, cobblers and carpet weavers. Together they sustained imperial trade and supplied a burgeoning society with their material needs.

Many craftsmen are still at it. Walking through the bustling Kasera bazaar, the blacksmiths are impossible to ignore: standing at their workshops which open onto the street, they press blades and other tools onto sharpening wheels, prompting the shrill, piercing sound of drills and sprays of sparks like fireworks. Here, in his tiny workshop, I meet Affif Mughal, a blacksmith whose forefathers made swords for the Mughal court and aristocracy. With the decline of the Sikh Empire in the 19th century, his family switched to knives and scissors. Today, Affif’s scissors are used by Lahore’s tailors and cobblers. These artisans comprise an ecosystem. Such relationships are a remnant of former, more prosperous days, when dozens of craft industries were bound together.

Lahore’s artisans are proud of their heritage. Down a back alley off the Moti bazaar, on the floor of a tiny room, I meet Fazal Durrani, a shoemaker in the Walled City since 1981. “The Mughal Emperors had their own cordwainers (cobblers),” he says, waving a leather sole under his work lights. “I am continuing this tradition”.

With the decline of the Mughal Empire, many of Lahore’s crafts diminished. The artisans’ fortunes were invigorated under the muscular reign of the Sikh, Ranjit Singh, but by the time the British seized the city, in 1846, new patterns of trade threatened the old professions. Over the ensuing decades, British manufactured imports, such as umbrellas and bicycles, began to appear in Lahore’s shops. With a new political economy came changes in consumption patterns.

Rudyard Kipling was in Lahore at the time. When the author depicted the Walled City in his 1891 story, The City of the Dreadful Night, he described a place of “fetid breezes”, lepers and corpses, a city “of Death as well as Night”. As a champion of the British Empire, Kipling has always faced criticism. Orwell labeled him a “jingo imperialist”. Today, some will see Kipling’s portrayal of the Walled City as ‘orientalising’; that he rendered the place otherworldly and uncivilized, its people listless, and therefore, by implication, worthy of subjugation.

But the ‘creative destruction’ of British-led capitalism was already imposing itself upon many of Lahore’s old trades. From the time of the Raj onwards, Lahore’s artisans have faced stiff competition from market forces, while many fail to adapt to changing tastes. One craft struggling to survive today is hookah pipe production. Passing stalls displaying colourful dupattas and saris, I walk around the Wazir Khan mosque, where Kipling set his story. Here, I meet Umer Saleem, a large, thoughtful man, and one of the Walled City’s last hookah pipe makers.

“There used to be 30 workshops here. Now there are only three,” he says. Saleem’s family began making smoking pipes three generations ago. He describes the history of the hookah, invented by the Persian physicist, Abu’l-Fath Gilani, in the 16th century. He proclaims their social value, as a way of “bringing people together” and “taking time”. But he is not optimistic. A 2013 law banned their use in cafés and restaurants. Also, he concedes, “the new generation prefers cigarettes”. Saleem has suffered a 75 percent decline in sales.

In recent decades, the Chinese have taken up where the British began. Chinese factories supply everyday items to Lahore’s markets, at prices that undercut local producers and capture domestic markets. Up two flights of stairs, in a hot, bare room in the Langa Mandi quarter, I meet a metalworker called Muhammad Muzamil. Working on the floor beside two other craftsmen, he is feeling the pinch. “China has introduced cheaper goods. They have their own factory designs, but I believe hand-made is better,” he says, while hammering a pattern into a steel buffet lid. Muzamil’s great-grandfather started their business, in Delhi, but he is not passing his craft onto his children. “It is too up and down” he says.

If the fate of Lahore’s artisans seems bleak, there are grounds for hope. Several organisations are supporting craftsmen. The Walled City of Lahore Authority (WCLA), for example, wants to highlight the influence that artisans have had on the city. “Old Lahore was a place where people were identified with their skills. Places still bear the names of the craftsmen who worked there, like Bowmakers Street,” says Kamran Lashari, the WCLA Director General. The WCLA has offers leases to designated shopkeepers to sell local crafts along Food Street, a prominent avenue near the crimson walls of the Badshahi Mosque. The WCLA has also been giving free day tours for visitors around the Walled City and the Lahore Fort since 2012, and began organizing night tours last year. Passing areas such as the Lohari Davarza (Blacksmiths’ Gate), the walks navigate places where the Lahore’s craft history lives on today.

Over the past decade, the WCLA has partnered with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) to conserve some of Lahore’s most remarkable buildings. Initially, AKTC restored the walls and mashrabiya of the old havelis along the Shahi Guzargah, the Royal Trail. Processions of Mughal Emperors coming from Delhi would follow this road, entering Lahore via the Delhi Gate and travelling on to the Lahore Fort. Craftsmen under AKTC have also conserved the last remaining Mughal-era bathhouse, the Shahi Hammam, as well as the walls, minarets and façade of the Wazir Khan mosque. Both structures were built in the 17th century.

AKTC’s most ambitious project is the restoration of the 450 metre-long and 16-metre high Mughal-era ‘Picture Wall’ in the Lahore Fort. Constructed in the early 17th century, it was exquisitely decorated by hundreds of artisans under Shah Jahan. The result was an artistic triumph; a monumental screen of over 110 panels comprising glazed tiles, faience mosaics and frescoes. Some of these depict figurative images, such as angels and dragons. These motifs, now brought back into focus through the AKTC restoration, reveal what was an outward-looking Empire, receptive to eastern and western ideas.

These days, walls are rarely the subject of unanimous praise, nor do they elicit a sense of pluralism. But this one inverts the idea. Dozens of young female and male architects, fresco painters, chemists, digital conservators and historians are collaborating on this assignment. The project may take several years, but the conservators are a pool of enthusiasm. They discuss the wall’s Persian, Italian and Chinese influences. The older master craftsmen, busy restoring tiles, filigree and brickwork, are equally excited. One evening, as the sun is setting behind the nearby tomb of Ranjit Singh, I climb up to the highest point of scaffolding along the wall. There, I meet Ala Uddin, a master mason. He is laying bricks. “I love this wall,” he says, his face literally glowing in the orange light. “It brings our culture and traditions to life.”

Of course, restoring Lahore’s historic monuments will not tackle the structural economic factors threatening the city’s artisans. But these projects are employing craftsmen in numbers not seen in decades. These artisans are reviving Mughal techniques, while also working with a diverse community of practitioners trained in the latest methods. The results will attract more visitors to Lahore, generating income that can be reinvested into further restoration work. The project may even awaken a demand for craftsmanship among wealthy Lahoris looking to embellish their homes.

Yet the restoration work is really about something deeper. If the Picture Wall displays Lahore’s cosmopolitan past, the way it is being restored suggests a pluralistic present rarely found in contemporary narratives of Pakistan. The multidisciplinary team of craftsmen and conservators, from different generations, gender and ethnic origin are, in their small way, embodying the ‘can do’ spirit that animated the city four centuries ago.

My last interview in Lahore was with an elderly master mason, Mohammad Ramzan. It was after dusk, and the end of his day. What he said about the Picture Wall, and the restoration effort, lingered in my memory: “It is a way of understanding our identity.”

A version of this article was published in the FT Weekend

Southern Tunisia (in The Week)

Tunisia (The Week)

Journey Through Southern Tunisia

In the cool interior of his troglodyte cave, Ali Diglish is speaking at full tilt. The 26-year-old guide from Chenini barely draws breath. Like much of the country these days, this Berber village in southern Tunisia doesn’t get many visitors, so Diglish is seizing his chance.

This article featured in the Travel section of the Financial Times Weekend edition. The full article can be found by clicking on the link here.

FT Weekend

The Artisans of al-Darb al-Ahmar: Life and Work in Historic Cairo

It is midday. The sun is high and hot, yet the street is alive. Kids play football. Goats, tethered to a wall, observe stoically. Motorcyclists thread past on bleating, smoky mopeds. The air is filled with dust, flies, and lingering smells of rubbish. I am in a Cairo neighbourhood that few foreigners visit these days: al-Darb al-Ahmar. Walking among the many mosques and madrasas, I hope to learn more about the artisans that work there.

“Whatever manufactured items there are in the world”, wrote the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi in 1671, “the poor of Cairo get hold of them, set them out and trade in them. They get by in this fashion.” Nearly three hundred and fifty years later, this tradition lives on in al-Darb al-Ahmar. This extraordinary neighbourhood of 100,000 people, which lies to the south-east of central Cairo, is said to be home to a thousand workshops; the place is teeming with artisans, crafting everything from tents, books, boxes and brass lanterns to glass bowls and silk carpets. They trade what they can, and they get by.

The Street of the Tentmakers captures this vibrant, commercial spirit. Built in 1650 as an arcade, this covered street is a succession of workrooms whose interiors are lined with colourful, decorative textiles. From his cubic cavity in the Ottoman-era wall, a weaver called Hasan says that al-khayyamiya, the craft of tentmaking, goes back to Pharaonic times. Some of today’s weavers are descended from the families who would produce the kiswa, the fabric that covered the great stone at Mecca, as well as tents, cloths and saddles for those setting out on pilgrimage to Mecca. The sultan, sitting nearby on a balcony above the ancient Fatimid gate of Bab Zuwayla would watch the caravan depart in procession.

Perhaps Hasan notices my pleasure at imagining this sweep of history, alive today. “We are lucky to be born here”, he says, with a smile. “It is a heritage site, and a spiritual place. If you wanted to create a neighbourhood like this, you could not. It is impossible to conceive of all the elements that you find in al-Darb al-Ahmar.”

The district’s heritage is indeed remarkable. The area, covering just under a square mile, contains over 40 monuments built during successive Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman eras, spanning a thousand year period. In collaboration with the government, many of these, such as the Aqsunqur Mosque and Amir Khayrbak complex, have been restored by the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). Such efforts are crucial to preserve Cairo’s Islamic heritage and attract more visitors and custom to the neighbourhood.

In al-Darb al-Ahmar, the only foreign faces I see are young Muslims from Indonesia. They are attending the nearby al-Azhar University, a centre for Islamic learning. Western tourists currently avoid Cairo due to security concerns; there have been several Islamist militant attacks on Egypt’s Christian minority in recent years. Walking around the neighbourhood, however, I feel perfectly safe. Countless old men, seated at the ubiquitous qahwa where they drink glasses of coffee or tea, welcome me with the words “ahlan wa sahlan”.

At times the fortunes of al-Darb al-Ahmar waver with Egypt’s. Next to the 14th century Aslam al-Silahdar Mosque, I enter a thread-dying house. I meet Salama, who has been a dyer for 73 years. In the darkness, figures are hauling skeins of cotton out of a stone bath of black dye. Dark steaming liquid streams across the floor. Salama tells me how, under the revolutionary regime of Nasser, business was good: “the Russians would give us weapons, and we would give them cloth.” But in 1967 things changed after the disastrous Six-Day War against Israel. Then after Nasser came Sadat who liberalised the economy, opening it up to domestic and foreign investment. Cheaper goods entered the local market. Small producers in the neighbourhood were hit. Many lost their jobs. Families were torn apart. For a time, says Salama, it was “chaos”.

Most craftsmen from the neighborhood are physically and mentally immersed in their history, reviving elements of their culture each day. I witness a clear example of this inside the workshop of two bookbinders near Cairo’s al-Azhar Mosque. Aslam and his colleague bind 150 books a day. Along their workspace are piles of half-bound books. They are currently binding a tafsir, a commentary on the Qur’an, written in 630 hijri (1232 CE). As I leave, Aslam smiles and describes one of their ‘special’ books, about Alexander the Great, first produced on papyrus in 330 BC.

When the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi visited Cairo in the 17th century, he recorded 20 workshops employing 300 carpet-makers. “They weave silk carpets and prayer-rugs, in praise of which the tongue falls short” he wrote. In a small room in the backstreets of the nearby Manshiyat Nasser slum, of all places, that skill is alive today. It takes two people six months to produce a two-by-three-metre silk carpet. They sit on a low bench, facing the vertical loom with a cartoon of the finished design above them. Their technique, says one plainly, has been employed for over 1500 years.

Near to al-Darb al-Ahmar is Cairo’s sprawling ‘City of the Dead’, where locals have been buried since the Muslim conquest of Egypt more than 1,300 years ago. Today, because of rapid urban growth, a quarter of a million Cairenes live among the shrines and tombs. In this living graveyard I meet an ex-boxer turned glassblower called Hasan ‘Hodhod’. Hodhod says his work has been associated with ghosts, mystery and myths that go back to King Solomon deceiving the Queen of Sheba. In an attempt to dissuade him from taking up such arduous work, his father tried to spook him, describing glassblowing as “the craft of the spirits”.

It is dusk. A bread-delivery boy cycles by, seated upright, balancing a five foot-long tray of freshly baked aish baladi on his head. Moments later I meet Mohamed, a third-generation lantern-maker. Our conversation reveals the influences that history has had on the craft sector. Inside his workshop, half-finished brass and iron lanterns rest on shelves and tables, dimly lit by a single bulb. To make the ornate metal pieces, Mohamed draws on Cairo’s heritage, using Mamluk, Coptic, Andalusian and Moroccan designs. Mohamed says that “now is the most difficult time”, as the prices of raw materials have risen yet there are fewer tourists, who were his main buyers. Yet he finds an unexpected positive: Syrians have come, because of the war. They started forming workshops, for upholstering beds and producing clothes. Through their enterprise, he reflects, they have contributed to the local economy. “They have helped us a lot”, he says.

Towards the end of my time in al-Darb al-Ahmar, I garner another perspective, which suggests that craftsmen possess a degree of resilience against historical events. I ask an 81-year-old cloth dyer what impact the Arab Spring-inspired 2011 revolution and subsequent counter-revolution have had on artisans. “For us, nothing has changed,” he replies, “except the President. Our lives, the food we eat, the money we earn – it is the same.”

It seems history laps over this place in layers, like the lines of a tide. The imprint is felt, but only lightly. Events are merely absorbed into the welter. Amid so much life, death, creation and renewal, the sense of flow, or cyclicality, is palpable. I believe these artisans are at the heart of this. Despite the tumult in their country and the wider region, they get by.

Harry Johnstone

A version of this article was published in The Guardian.

The exhibition – ‘The Artisans of al-Darb al-Ahmar: Life and Work in Historic Cairo’ – is being held at the Royal Geographical Society, Exhibition Road, London, between Thursday 22 March and Tuesday 24 April 2018. Admission is free.

The Artisans of Al Darb Al Ahmar

Last week I returned from Cairo, where I was working on a project with artisans from a wonderful, fascinating neighborhood called Al Darb Al Ahmar. It was an incredible experience, and great fun working with Chris Wilton-Steer and Ghada Kabesh. I will be writing up my notes and hopefully some articles and exhibitions will ensue over the coming months. Watch this space!

Darb cloth dyer.jpg

Bullfighting

bullfight

Ten days ago I watched a ‘bullfight’ in Jerez. We were there during the Feria. At the time, it was hard to process the experience of watching a bull slowly killed by a small group of men on a sandy floor.

The crowd are elegant. They wear suits and ties and elegant floral dresses. Those who sit in the sun have fans. People drink sherry out of small glasses. They applaud when the bull comes lumbering out.

It charges out of the gate. The first thing one notices is how much muscle it possesses. The whole body is rippling; the haunches creased with muscle that wobbles over his back. You notice its size. Most of the them are more compact, lower to the ground, than you’d expect. But they move fast. And stupidly. They have no expression. Dumb, is the word. They look around confused. They reach the edge of the circular ground. A man with a pink cape gets the bull’s attention. It moves towards him with trite gusto.

The ease with which the man moves away from the bull makes one pity the bull immediately. We’re smiling at our superiority from the start. The picadors emerge. They weaken the bull. The armoured man on the protected horse emerges. He plunges a spear into the bull for ten seconds. He twists the spear in deep. The bull now is severely weakened. No longer does he run with gusto. He’s breathing deeply. His stomach contracts and expands greatly with each deep breath.

The picadors spring balletically towards it and plant decorated pins onto the arch of the bull’s neck. Blood seeps down his neck. The toredor spins the bull around him, to the joy of the crowd. The bull’s stomach is now wrenching fast.

Eventually he plunges a sword deep into a spot on the bull’s neck. I assume it carries through to the bull’s heart. If he misses the spot, the bulls stays alive. When this happens the crowd whistle. They do not approve of this. It is unfair to the bull! It is bad sportsmanship.

To me this ‘show’ of mercy to the bull seems absurd. The animal never had a chance in the first place. There’s no logic to their thinking. Sure, by hitting the spot you assure a less painful, drawn-out death. But you’re wounding the bull throughout its time in the stadium with the initial spearing and the pins.

The toredor eventually kills the bull. The crowd cheers. The bull lies on its side, tongue dangling. Sometimes its feet twitch as it dies. Horses come in with chains to drag the bull away. The trailing body leaves a smooth wide line over the sand as it is dragged towards the pen. Its feet remain taught. The banality of death.

I almost cried at times during the six fights we watched. The killing of animals was of course shocking in itself. But it would be hypocritical to oppose it while I eat meat, slaughtered in factories.

What is disturbing is we are paying to be entertained by the killing of animals. I looked across to examine the faces of the crowd and felt very alone and somewhat afraid. Like how I could feel sometimes on a dance floor when lots of people are on drugs.

And in a sense, what I was watching was the same. A kind of mass hypnosis. A sense that since others are there, participating, it’s ok. And my fears about human weakness came to the fore. Our hypocrisy. Our stupidity. The apparent ease with which we can legitimise something in numbers. Weakness in numbers.

Herat

Once again I was woken to the rising cries of the muezzin. Below, in the square connected to the Darb Khosh, carpet dealers are rolling out their crimson wares. It was an everyday scene in an altogether remarkable setting. 14-year-old Mohammed, the sullen relation of lazy-eyed Jalid, the Hotel Jaam’s manager, entered my room with yet another pot of green tea. The curtains of the open window were flailing again, and the wind smelled of rotten mangoes and car fumes.

Like the searing winds that swirl around it for 120 days a year, Herat is a city whose history rarely sits still. The wide plains that characterise this region of Afghanistan have made it difficult to defend. Its strategic importance as a trading route between Pakistan and Iran have made Herat the trophy city of successive vanquishers. Persian, Russian, British and Afghan troops all fought to acquire this prized domain within their spheres of influence. It was the birthplace of the Timurid renaissance.

More than a pawn of empires, Herat has also played host to some of Asia’s greatest personalities; Jenghiz Khan, Tamerlane, Queen Gawhar Shad, Shah Rukh and Babur all made their mark. It was famously at the end of Robert Bryon’s ‘Road to Oxiana’, the confirmed Afghanophile gladly wrote: ‘Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex.’ Were her glories still intact, or had the scars of war consigned Herat to the scrapheap of historical anonymity?

The Hotel Jaam was full of Pakistani salesmen or groups of Afghan traders passing through. All would leave their bedroom doors wide open. We would gather in the lobby for dinner, a horde of ‘shalwar kamiz’ (the flowing robe-like clothing) and beards, glued to an old TV that seemed to show solely Bollywood music videos, 2nd rate action movies or the occasional anti-Taliban video sequence. Contrary to ‘hippie-trail’ perception, few Afghans smoke. It is, after all, a luxury not many can afford.

My days were spent soaking up the loaded feel of the streets. I would walk up the Jada-i Qumadari, to the old carpet and curio shops, full of dubious trinkets, muskets and knives amassed from fields and forts, and coins scavenged from the Musalla complex. While Shah Rukh (think chess) was responsible for the original complexion of the city, his remarkable wife, Gawhar Shad, started building this complex of mosque and madrassa (school for the teaching of Islam, and Islamic law) in 1417. What used to be 30 of the world’s tallest, most ornately-tiled minarets are now 5 wind-worn, leaning towers, and the ‘complex’ is little more than a rubbled wasteland with a main road running through its centre Buddha Bamiyan . Byron believed it represented ‘the most glorious production of Mohammedan architecture in the fifteenth century’. It is yet another Afghan treasure, like the Buddha’s of Bamiyan, violated by war.

There is something deeply historical about the atmosphere of Herat. Afghans themselves seem to represent all those years of consequence in their appearance. The face of an Afghan man mirrors the fate of his country. Furrowed brows and weathered skin reflect a life surrounded by conflict and climatic extremes. Great wreaths of facial hair and a handsome nose uphold a weighty dignity. And then the smile. It demonstrates the warmth of character so unique to these people. To the westerner who is so fortunate to see such radiance in a land of supposed gloom, it is an inspiration. Herat’s streets are full of such faces, walking and hawking along pock-marked asphalt, dirt and debris, where crazed cyclists dodge past horse-carts decorated with red pom-poms and bells and stalls selling all sorts, sidle the thoroughfares.

“It was easier under the Taliban”, said Yusuf, former de-miner for OMAR (Organisation for Mine clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation), referring to their lack of restraint when it came to the job of accessing and exploding the ordinances. Esther, a Swiss doctor, showed me around the International Committee of the Red Cross’ (ICRC) Orthopaedic Centre. When asked about the Afghan people her face unmasked a raw emotion. “I’ve been trying to come here for years”, she said, as we moved through rooms of mine-victims, some paralysed from the waist down, some tetraplegic, others limping around with the aid of crutches. Many victims, if capable of using their arms, are employed after treatment in the making of others’ prosthetic limbs. “Many of our patients have relations who were in the Taliban. They don’t resent them”, she said. “I find the culture fascinating”, she sparkled intensely, and informed me that a female colleague believed the burka to be a source of liberty, like an invisibility cloak. The awful problems were evident enough but it was her inspiration, and her source of inspiration – the Afghan people –that gave one hope.

I had seen enough evidence of wars; the bullet-peppered walls of the Citadel, the guns-for-cash placards, the preponderance of crutches and cripples were all too visible. I had spoken to and seen many Afghans caring for their past, now I wanted to find Afghans who sought a bright future.

On my final day, I visited the Masjid-i Jami. It is undoubtedly Afghanistan’s finest surviving example of Islamic architecture. As I stood awe-stuck in the huge white marble courtyard, figures began to emerge from the shade of the hooded portals. They were University students preparing for an English exam the following day. Naturally, they hounded me, but my exasperation soon turned to admiration. I was being corrected on the passive tense and was subject to further enquiries of conjugation. They knew of Chaucer, quoted Shakespeare and venerated the classical 18th century English writers. Their youthful ambition in this harmonious, virtuous setting made me forget about war and suffering for an instant and believe that, more than just a hopeful future, Heratis are the possessors of something unique.

For this article I was awarded the Irish SMEDIA Award and shortlisted at the UK Guardian Student Media Awards for the category of Travel Journalism.