Storm Over Cairo — Manar Moursi

Storm Over Cairo is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, an Al Serkal Research Grant and a Mophradat Writing Sabbatical Grant.

My text was read by the following interlocutors, who generously shared feedback that was formative to the writing: Amy Cheung, Elizabeth Fox, Iman Mersal, David Puig, Thalia Rubio, and Sarah Sarofim.

Storm Over Cairo Coming soon in 2027

Storm Over Cairo is a book made over a decade, part of the ongoing project The Loudspeaker and the Tower.

Beginning in 2014, I spent roughly five years hiring taxi drivers and circling the city's edges at night, photographing the new mosque architecture rising along the Ring Road and the highways that follow the Nile: minarets lit in green and blue neon, loudspeakers strapped to streetlights, prayer halls fused with gas stations, workshops and apartment blocks. Over those years I made some three hundred photographs of a religious architecture that no official plan accounts for, built instead through improvised acts of construction, wiring and repair.

I began the drives as a way back into a city I had left and a faith I had lost, and they became a way of asking who builds these mosques, who is heard, and whose knowledge gets to stand. The book answers through the people I spent years talking to along those roads — the electricians, brickmakers, caretakers, farmers, drivers, small developers and Al-Azhar sheikhs who build, light, design, maintain and fund this architecture, and whose words carry a history the official plans leave out.

A minaret, it turns out, is a practical key as often as a spiritual beacon: a small prayer hall can secure an electricity connection for a whole development. Seen through a windscreen, abundance looks like devotion. Traced through permits, it looks like strategy. The book holds both.

I made image and text as two recordings of the same circling. The photographs are the outward windscreen; the writing is the inward drift, moving between reportage, the deep history of mosque and road building in Egypt, and a personal reckoning with my mother's faith and her death. The text refuses chronological order. The photographs I organised by place, gathering them into three plate signatures for the three geographies I made them in. Neither element illustrates the other. They turn around the same axis, the way the drives circled the same road and the same grief.