Hassan Fathy and Continuity in Islamic Arts and Architecture

The Birth of a New Modern

Ahmad Hamid

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781617973727
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Hassan Fathy, the Egyptian architect known for his recognition of the potential of vernacular forms as a vital force in contemporary architectural design, sought to integrate the traditions of Islamic art with his modern visions for living. Guided by Fathy's principles, Ahmad Hamid, an architect who collaborated with Hassan Fathy in the Institute for Appropriate Technology, identifies questions about the nature of Islamic art and its building culture, as well as the origins of modern architecture.This richly illustrated book provides new insights into Hassan Fathy's profuse, pathbreaking design documents and built projects, while exploring the socioeconomic, environmental, psychological, and esthetic components of Fathy's work in the light of a quest for a new universal modernity for the twenty-first century.

1

THE HIBERNATION OF A TRADITION

In the exhilaration that accompanied the arrival of what we know as ‘modern man,’ tradition had to disguise itself. The constant flow of inventions in the twentieth century created what could be called a contraction in the pulse of time. The quick pace of inventions allowed societies to marvel at the fruits of modern creation as if they were being completely born anew, with no connection to the past. Society at large adopted the scientific viewpoint that the ‘latest’ is always best. Modernity brought with it the belief that a Certain newness was repeatedly created, one that enabled each generation to differ dramatically from previous ones.

In addition to changing the perception of time, technology can trick human beings into believing that two geographically distinct experiences are in fact adjacent to one another. Imagine flying from Cairo to Amsterdam and perceiving no lands in between. Or consider a well-known joke about a Sa‘idi (a person from Upper Egypt) who rides in an elevator for the first time in Cairo and returns to his village to tell his friends how pushing a button brought the desired floor to his level. The Sa‘idi assumes he is the central, stationary force and that his surroundings are under his command. In both examples, technology tricks the human being into believing that two physically remote occurences are in fact directly related to one another.

A similar phenomenon occurred in Islamic art and architecture with regard to time. Writers, historians, and builders overlooked the potential connections between new expressions and the past. Muslim scholars identified within technology certain tricks (hiyal) that lead to a state of mind that accepts illusions. It is little wonder, then, that one of the earliest books on Islamic technology was called al-Jami‘ bayn al-‘ilm wa-l-‘amal al-nafi‘ fi sina‘at al-hiyal (The Compilation of Science and Beneficial Hope in the Manufacture of Tricks) by Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jaziri. Rapid change was celebrated as if nothing worthwhile had preceded it.¹

The disassociation between new and conventional practices led to the dismissal of traditional forms and techniques, a phenomenon I call the “hibernation of tradition.” As a method to research the issue of continuity between the traditional and the modern, I draw on sources outside the discipline of art history in order to analyze the issue. Narrow disciplinary approaches often create artificial demarcations between periods or styles. As Einstein said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” Addressing the issue using both theory and practice—not only theories of art history, philosophy, and the social sciences, but also the practice of Islamic art and architecture in the contemporary world—I hope to bring the catalytic role of Hassan Fathy to the forefront.

Throughout this work, I continuously redefine tradition and modernity because they are in a continuous, fluctuating, symbiotic paradigm.² It is counterproductive to provide static definitions for what is modern and what is traditional. Islam’s art and architecture belong to the world traditions, yet within them there is a primordial tradition that encompasses the modern. As Edward Said writes, “We can read ourselves against another people’s pattern, but since it is not ours . . . We emerge as its effects, its errata, its counter narratives. Whenever we try to narrate ourselves, we appear as dislocations in their discourse.”³ The idea that the Enlightenment was the sole generator of modernity needs to be rethought and restructured to include others. The concept of modernity needs to be rewritten to include the contributions of other civilizations.

Fabricating the Opposition
between the Traditional and the Modern

The opposition between the traditional and the modern became more accentuated with the advent of printing and subsequently during the Renaissance. Modern became better, more sought after. Traditional ways of perceiving the world were no longer suitable to progressive times. This opposition was artificially fabricated, serving to prolong the short shelf life of the modern. In addition, it kept all traditions of former societies away from any claim to having participated in the progression of humanity in modern times.⁴ This exclusion was well suited to ignoring Muslim cultures that, prior to the Renaissance, had been at the forefront of bringing scientific progress and new ideas to the west. Since the Renaissance, with every rise of ‘the modern’ in the west, the gulf with Islam grew proportionally.

The term ‘modern’ itself has grown over a period of centuries to mean progress, goodness, and a better, more functionally efficient world. Originally, however, the term ‘modern’ meant something intrinsically different without implying progress, or implying this absolute continuity of improvement. With the advent of the Renaissance, the term was simply used to indicate in Europe the difference separating the modern from the middle ages.

Organic growth is a quality of this term ‘modern.’ Hegel, around 1800, used it to define the German Christian world originating from Roman and Greek antiquity. In its development, ‘modern’ stood as an antithesis to the immediate past. It carried with it the power of oppositional significance.⁵ This continuous newness is a healthy phenomenon, but different powers fabricated an oppositional struggle between what is modern at a given time and everything that preceded it. With this, the term ‘modern’ acquired a schismatic role. The integrative forces were subsumed into the background and the divisive forces cut time into segments of the modern ages, the middle ages, and antiquity. This divided society into a more senile, paternalistic past versus a young, progressive present that is for now and tomorrow.

Habermas agrees to this pride of newness. Building on Reinhart Koselleck’s arguments, he writes:⁶

The dynamic concepts that either emerged together with the expression ‘modern age’ or ‘new age’ in the eighteenth century or acquired then a new meaning that remains valid down to our day are adapted to this—words such as revolution, progress, emancipation, development, crisis, and zeitgeist. . . . These expressions also became key terms for Hegelian philosophy. They cast conceptual-historical consciousness of western culture that had developed in connection with the oppositional concept of a ‘new age’: Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself.

Nothing is created ex nihilo, nor is there any historical vacuum. I find it impossible and even anomalous to suggest creating any “normativity out of itself.”

The Divorce between the Traditional and the Modern

The divorce between the traditional and the modern was an inevitable outcome of Eurocentric notions of progress that eventually led to colonizing ‘the other,’ inclusive of Muslim lands. Napoleon’s expedition is sometimes viewed in a manner that blurs the military aspects and ambitions and intensifies the so-called scientific and explorative nature of the French. The French Napoleonic expedition was not about cultural exploration but about gathering military information.⁷ The French in effect used the Description de l’Egypte project to prolong their stay in the country. Their pretext of dominion masquerading as social improvement or cultural exploration underlay all their colonial ambitions. Nevertheless, later ties between France and Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt led to scientific and educational exchanges that benefited both countries.

Critical opinions and writings termed the break from the past ‘humanism,’ and eventually humanism was born as the major field crowning this newness. But it is in humanism that we are expected to practice our humanity, away from tradition, religion, and particularly away from the east. Matthew Arnold, a nineteenth-century English critic, “acknowledged that the old glue—religion—that had tenuously and often unsuccessfully held together the ailing European regimes could not do so in the mid-nineteenth century. Arnold saw that the democratic temper was the wave of the future. So he proposed a new conception of culture—a secular humanistic one—that could play an integrative role in cementing and stabilizing an emerging bourgeois civil society and imperial state.”⁸

In addition, the rise of mass media, mass travel, and mass culture gave the theory of divorce between humanism and the east ample grounds for consumption. Mass culture propagated the idea that progress always shines from Europe. The social sciences were built around the assumption that there is a dichotomy between tradition and modernity, east and west. These disciplines were founded on the idealization of European Renaissance man and the superiority of Renaissance culture. They disseminated and solidified power struggles between east and west while severing the Muslim empire from its role in building Europe’s Renaissance. Hence modernity as we know it today was construed by rejecting any other past or ‘other.’ This is the basis of Eurocentric thought.

Mass education, too, in the twentieth century repressed former sciences and knowledge. Some earlier thinkers were already denigrating history as a waste of time and trivial storytelling.⁹ Makers and inventors alike propagated the idea that, with them, everything was born anew and that the past was an unnecessary burden.¹⁰ These thoughts were further intensified by the same societies that reacted by over-safeguarding or protecting their past, as with Britain, which was considered ‘the workshop of the world’ until the end of the nineteenth century. It was then that other countries challenged its supremacy by embracing mechanized production that British traditionalists rejected. They refused to let their traditions evolve and, in so doing, proved that their ways were obsolete. Their obstinacy did not allow traditions to be interlaced with the new values of the modern world.¹¹

Incidentally, the traditionalists themselves instigated the divorce of the traditional from the modern. For example, the work of Ruskin and Morris in the art circles of English society attached demonic and unethical qualities to the modern movement in art and craft making. Victorian and moralist at best, their arguments were highly separative between a golden past and a miserable present. They saw themselves as Christian social saviors of the slow and handmade world.¹² This was a grave mistake and sparked a similar reaction in several cultures, including Muslim ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This approach changed only with the advance of the nation state in the Muslim world. Nation states were new concepts in themselves and therefore promoted concepts of newness in all other sectors. The disassociation of modernity from tradition, particularly in the developed world and consequently, throughout the rest of the world, was announced in manifestos that were not unlike political proclamations. This disassociation was in favor of politicians, citizens, educated engineers and artists, and the socially aspiring strata of any society. It was against society’s memories and history. These mechanisms of rejection were instantly gratifying to those regarded as privileged modernists, who saw themselves as instantly freed and liberated. As Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner insist in their manifesto “Basic Principles of Constructivism,”¹³ “rejection of ” was their main objective.

Mass travel in the nineteenth century also brought western rational civilization in contact with the orient. The west was exposed to an entirely different world that did not function solely according to the strict laws of reason. The west’s sense of superiority may have been a defense mechanism of sorts to this alternative mode of living that challenged its entire mindset. This changed with time as the hidden forces of admiration for the ‘other’ surfaced, at least in the domain of art and architecture.¹⁴ In his seminal work The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal brings the past into a family of related abstract concepts such as tradition, memory, myth, lineage, familiarity, identity, moral values, authority, history, ruin, and relics. He analyzes the overlapping interactions of the above concepts, which are a powerful force in our understanding of the relationship between tradition and modernity—if one of them is altered they are all affected, indicating how inextricably interrelated they are. For instance, when modern politicians criticized traditions in the name of economic progress, they did not realize the ripple effects that that criticism would have throughout society and particularly in family structures.

Under the heading “New Science” Lowenthal writes: “What most sharply polarized the ancients–moderns conflict was the advent of a scientific spirit in 17th century Britain and France. The revelations of immediate sensory experience convinced many scholars that contemporary observations and experiments must supplement, correct and even supplant past knowledge.”¹⁵ The rise of rational thought and empirical method affected production, education, artistry, building, and belief systems.¹⁶ Reason and empiricism equaled pragmatism. Time previously spent pursuing excellence in art, decoration, building, or drawing an architectural edifice was regarded as inefficient. Time that went into art and architectural training or production was regarded with the mentality of a conveyer belt technology—“the less time the better.” This clashed with the pursuit of beauty and proportionality, which is inherently time consuming. The way time is valued in a consumer culture does not allow for these pursuits in art and architecture. The increasing focus on efficiency and the monetary value of time led to an increase in mechanization, causing Siegfried Giedion to name his 1948 book Mechanization Takes Command. Giedion’s work, among others, was responding to Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime, written in 1908 but not published until 1913. Loos criticized wasting time and money on making art or buildings ornate. He emphasized the rise in early twentieth century modern thought of the utilitarian and functional ideas that influenced artists and architects. The functional was highly esteemed as the absolute paradigm of the machine—maximum functionality and zero ornament. This prevailing thought further widened the schism with pre-industrial traditions. Functionalism prioritized efficiency over human contributions that sprung from the reservoirs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustration
• Foreward
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1. The Hibernation of a Tradition
• 2. The Institutionalization of Islamic Art and Architecture by the Aga Khan Foundation
• 3. Hassan Fathy: A Condenser of an Older Intelligence
• 4. Toward a New Islamic Art and Architecture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index