Mohamed Aly Street: More to It Than Meets the Eye.

Written by: Salma Abdelhamid

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Whenever I’m asked about the topic of my graduation project and I answer with “My group and I will be raising awareness about Mohamed Ali Street”, people get confused. “What are you going to raise awareness about? Belly dancers?”

To answer their question, I started getting to know the street from corner to corner and I’ve realized that we don’t do it justice. It’s way more than what we think it is. 

Our parents witnessed the modern version of the street back when it was the Broadway of Cairo. This wasn’t Khedive Ismail’s aim though when his idea came to life back in 1874.

His aim was to expand trade through constructing a street that acts as a shortcut between the Eastern and Western sides of Cairo. He named it after Mohamed Ali Pasha the well-known ruler of Egypt.

Why Paris in particular? That’s because the street was designed by a French official named George Eugène Haussmann who designed it to resemble Rue de Rivoli in Paris.

With a width of twenty meters, the construction of the street resulted in the destruction of about 700 buildings in addition to the front part of the fourteenth-century mosque of Qaysoun to broaden it.

It started as a westernized street designed by a French man; it then witnessed the rise of many artists like Abd El Halim Hafez. It’s a mixture of many cultures. You'll find mosques, shops that sell musical instruments, dancers, and sheikhs (Muslim religious leaders). You’ll find everything and its opposite in Mohamed Aly Street. Take a good look at it, walk through its alleys and you’ll see every phase Egypt has gone through since the era of Mohamed Aly Pasha till this day.