Open Discussions in association with Gulf Cultural Club
Preserving MENA’s heritage
*Richard Wilding (Fellow, Royal Geographical Society)
**Ominya Abdel Barr (Head of Development at the Egyptian
Heritage Rescue Foundation Fellow at the V & A)
Tuesday, 13th May 2025
As conflicts and tragic bloodshed continue to plague much of the MENA region, there are valuable lessons to learn from its glorious past. This discussion will examine some of the current challenges and opportunities for heritage preservation in Iraq and Egypt.
The annual hajj pilgrimage to Makkah ranks among the most significant religious journeys in the world. The hajj route connecting Kufa and Baghdad to Makkah and Madinah grew in importance during the first hundred years of the Abbasid Caliphate from 750 to 850 CE. It became known as the Darb Zubaydah in honour of Zubaydah bint Jafar, wife of the Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, recognising enhancements made to the route’s infrastructure. The pilgrim station of Umm Al-Qurun is the first surviving rest-stop heading south from Kufa. It includes a unique manara, or lighthouse, built to guide pilgrims travelling by night. Richard Wilding showed his photographs of Umm Al-Qurun and related sites in Iraq, highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities for heritage preservation. He looked at revitalisation initiatives undertaken further south on the Darb Zubaydah route in Saudi Arabia.
Since its foundation in 2013, the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation (EHRF) has been involved in various projects related to better preserve and document Egypt’s cultural and architectural heritage. In 2018, they launched their major project to document and rescue minbars (pulpits) in historic mosques made between 1250-1517, following a period of vandalism and neglect which resulted in many thefts. At that time, they succeeded in securing from the Supreme Council of Antiquities a listed medieval palace to house their teams and host their events and public programme. In her talk, Omniya presented the minbars project with a focus on the minbar of Sultan Lajin (1296) and she spoke about the EHRF efforts in restoring and rehabilitating Bayt al-Razzaz, EHRF’s home in Historic Cairo.
Richard Wilding: Hello everyone, and thank you for inviting Omniya and I to speak at the Gulf Cultural Club. It is an honour to be here, and I would like to thank in particular Karen Dabrowska for organising this event. I’m speaking today about a project I’m currently working on in southern Iraq about the Darb Zubaydah pilgrim road that once linked Kufa and Baghdad with Makkah and Madinah. But first I’d like to share a couple of other related sites nearby which I visited last month with the support of the Karbala Center for Studies and Research at the Hussein Holy Shrine.
Around 30 kms southwest of Karbala is Khan al-Atshan, probably dating back to the 2nd century AH. It may have originally been a caravanserai, and possibly a communication post between the fortress of al-Ukhaidar and Kufa. It is one of the places where Imam Hussain stayed on his journey to Karbala, and was later used as a resting place by pilgrims on their way to the holy shrines. The Manara Mujda was a tower, probably originally serving as a navigation beacon for travellers in the desert.
This main part of my presentation looks at a project I am currently working on in southern Iraq with Professor Rajwan Al-Maiyali and the University of Al-Qadisiyah. It focusses on the protection and documentation of an important site on the Darb Zubaydah pilgrim road that once linked Kufa and Baghdad with Makkah and Madinah.
The annual Islamic pilgrimage to the holy city of Makkah is one of the five pillars of Islam and ranks among the most significant religious journeys in the world. For centuries before the advent of modern air travel, pilgrims travelled long distances by land and sea. The hajj routes followed pre-Islamic trade paths but gradually evolved to accommodate the specific needs of Islamic pilgrimage. Various routes emerged and flourished during different historical eras, adapting to the rise and fall of successive Islamic empires.
The hajj route connecting Kufa to Makkah and Madinah was also the route that Imam Hussein and his companions took in their tragic journey from Makkah to Iraq in 60 AH (680 CE). It continued to grow in importance during the first hundred years of the Abbasid Caliphate from 750 to 850 CE. The route became known as the Darb Zubaydah in honour of Zubaydah bint Jafar, wife of the Abbasid Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, recognising enhancements made to infrastructure along the route under her patronage.
Between Kufa and Makkah, the route stretches over a distance of 1,300 kilometres. The Abbasids originally constructed a series of 27 rest stops at intervals suited to the travelling speed of donkeys, horses and camels. An additional 27 intermediate stations were later added to cater for the increasing number of pedestrian pilgrims, while improvements were also made to the original 27 main stations. The new and enhanced infrastructure included a system of wells, cisterns and dams to provide water for travellers and their animals. Caravanserais, palaces and forts were constructed to improve the pilgrims’ safety and comfort, and some stretches of the route were paved. A series of milestones and markers were installed, with the addition of lighthouses to guide pilgrims who often travelled at night to avoid the daytime heat.
The Darb Zubaydah is now a transnational nomination for UNESCO World Heritage Site status, jointly submitted by the Republic of Iraq and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The section of the Darb Zubaydah located in present-day Iraq covers approximately one fifth of the total length of the route. The four sites in Iraq, from north to south, are the stations at Umm al-Qurun, Talhat, Sharaf (recorded as a stopping point on the route northwards followed by Imam Hussein) and Al-Aqaba.
The pilgrim station of Umm Al-Qurun is the first surviving rest-stop on the Darb Zubaydah heading south from Kufa towards Makkah. The station complex includes a square-shaped rest house, two basins and two square wells. The walls of the cisterns are still partially intact.
The cistern although largely filled with sand is covered with vegetation that indicates more humid soil still present in contrast to the surrounding desert. When I filmed one of the soldiers dropping a large stone down a well it took over five seconds to reach the bottom, which means it is over 100 metres deep. It seems, according to this primitive research method, that the wells are now dry, an indication of the falling water table in southern Iraq.
The wells at Umm Al-Qurun do not bear inscriptions like those seen on stones near the top of the wells at Talhat.
Umm Al-Qurun includes a unique surviving example of a manara, or lighthouse, built to guide pilgrims travelling by night. The Manara al-Qurun, or “minaret of horns”, was built during the Saljuk era under Sultan Malik-shah. The manara was mentioned by Ibn Jubayr when he travelled along the Darb Zubaydah in around 1183 CE. He described a tower rising in a stretch of desert with no buildings around it. It had a conical shape and was built of baked bricks and decorated with gazelle horns which made it appear like the back of a hedgehog. The manara is, as described by Ibn Jubayr, situated alone in the desert 1.3 km from the rest station. Its separate location was possibly due to the need for siting on higher ground, whereas the station complex needed to be located at a lower elevation for its wells and cisterns.
At some point in the past, the manara has collapsed and now consists of two main sections, a square foundation and a barrel-shaped section of the original tower. Being the closest surviving station on the Darb Zubaydah to the city of Najaf, the surviving architecture at Umm Al-Qurun, especially the manara and rest house, has been vulnerable to intentional and unintentional damage. Both structures are now in an extremely vulnerable state and in need of greater protection and stabilisation.
One, particularly concerning development, is the construction of a modern tarmacked road from Najaf along the route of the Darb Zubaydah. In addition to potentially disrupting important archaeology relating to the hajj route, the road passes extremely close to the site of Umm Al-Qurun, even passing between the station complex and manara.
Groundworks associated with the road building have resulted in the digging of numerous ditches close to the manara, and tracks left by bulldozers demonstrate how easily damage could be inflicted, even unintentionally, to this unique historical structure.
Funding from ASOR has allowed the project team to complete the following measures as a first phase of work at Umm Al-Qurun:
- Emergency protection around the manara including the erection of a fence and covering of the manara structure to reduce further erosion and graffiti.
- Documentation through photography and drone filming of all structures at Umm Al-Qurun in their current state of preservation.
- Community engagement with local stakeholders to increase awareness of the site’s importance and need for greater protection
In addition to surveys to assess the options for stabilisation and restoration of the structures at Umm Al-Qurun, the next stage of this project will also devise and undertake outreach initiatives among communities along the Darb Zubaydah route. These include visits and presentations to local schools and universities, community groups and representatives of religious authorities. We will also explore opportunities for involving local industry in subsequent phases of the project.
The modern road out of Najaf that follows the route of the Darb Zubaydah towards Umm Al-Qurun is lined for several miles by brickworks. The giant kilns where the bricks are fired are so large that a lorry can be driven inside for loading.
It is hoped that these local communities will be involved in providing building materials and expertise to allow the restoration of built heritage such as the manara and other infrastructure at Umm Al-Qurun.
We also plan to undertake surveys and documentation of intangible cultural heritage along the Darb Zubaydah route. The results should be incorporated into future development plans to ensure that sensitive intangible heritage will be protected and enhanced alongside the physical heritage and archaeology of the Darb Zubaydah.
I’d like to share a video I filmed on my iPhone of a camel herder at Talhat, the second major stop on the Darb Zubaydah heading south from Kufa. He uses this distinctive song to call the camels under his watch to follow him. When I showed this video to a young woman in Fayd on the Darb Zubaydah route in Saudi Arabia, she immediately recognised it as identical to the sounds made by her grandfather, a bedouin camel herder 500km to the south. [Video played]
Cuts to USAID and State Department programmes by President Trump’s administration have impacted human development and heritage projects in Iraq, and the status of the funding we had applied for to support our next phase of work is currently uncertain. This means we have to look elsewhere for funding, potentially from neighbouring countries, or from within Iraq itself. So, what are the opportunities and incentives for regional and local stakeholders?
When I started working on heritage projects in Saudi Arabia back in 2010, the country’s heritage was often neglected. Until the Kingdom opened up to international visitors in 2019 there was no income to be generated from tourism, and historical places were often associated with a difficult past.
The Kingdom’s heritage sites are now seen as one of the key attractions for both international and domestic tourists, and this has resulted in an ambitious programme of restoration and revitalisation.
As with Saudi Arabia, Iraq needs to urgently diversify its economy away from complete dependency on oil. As the birthplace of one of the world’s earliest and most important civilisations, there is great potential here for heritage tourism.
There are, of course, already tens of millions of religious tourists coming to Iraq but the number of international tourists visiting Iraq for its archaeology and heritage is relatively small. This is largely due to the perceived security risks, and also because the infrastructure is not in place. The Darb Zubaydah could potentially attract visitors drawn by both its religious and historical importance, helping to support ongoing protection and revitalisation. Shia pilgrims in Iraq continue to march along the Darb Zubaydah each year, commemorating the route taken by Imam Hussein.
In February 2025, I joined a group of 200 people walking a 90km stretch of the Darb Zubaydah near Ha’il in northern Saudi Arabia. Joining the walkers were cyclists, camels, horses, and even paragliders. This initiative raises the profile of the Darb Zubaydah, reconnects people with Islamic history, engages local communities along the route and provides opportunities for local businesses. I gave a presentation to the group one evening about the work we are doing on the Darb Zubaydah in Iraq. Many of the group expressed the wish that one day it may be possible to travel once again along the Darb Zubaydah all the way from Kufa to Makkah. Thank you.
Ominya Abdel Barr: This is very interesting because Richard showed us this beautiful desert landscape in Iraq and Saudi. I am taking you to the heart of Cairo but there is a connection because in front of Bayt al-Razzaz the hajj caravans used to pass. Richard was showing us Kufa. This is where the routes to Makkah started in front of Bayt al-Razzaz.
And Darb Zubaydah – when you go to Jeddah next time if you go visit the Haj terminus which is now the seat housing the Islamic Arts Biennale we have dug a well in memory of Darb Zubaydah. It is such a fascinating story.
Today I am going to speak to you about Bayt al-Razzaz which the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation was responsible for since 2018. But I personally worked on the restoration of this beautiful, medieval palace since 2004. We are located at the very end of the historic city, very close the citadel, Sultan Hassan and also Al-Azhart which is an important landmark in the city. It was gifted to Cairo by the Aga Khan. It was a project that took almost 30 years to complete. The idea was mooted in 1980.
I am speaking about the context surrounding us because the mashrabiya it is the only thing you can see from the street but we are surrounded by fabulous monuments: Mamluk but also Ottoman. One of the most beautiful monuments we have is a minaret from 1260. I am not very sure who built it but it is always fascinating to go up to the house and see it in front of us.
Bayt al-Razzaz was not restored by the Aga Khan probably because it was a house. The trust may been more interested in restoring religious buildings like mosques. Bayt al-Razzaz is a palace that was built by Sultan Qaytbay in the 15th century. It looks as if the only way to preserve historic houses is by buying them because there is no way of finding the proper funding to restore them and the people living in them do not have the means to restore them.
But most of these houses have not been inhabited for decades and that is why they are falling apart.
But we are in a neighbourhood full of craftsmanship. There is this very vibrant cultural heritage. . The Mamluks were the rulers of the city from 1250 to 1517. Cairo was the capital of the Mamluk Sultanate until the Ottomans came in 1517 and at that time we had the Hijaz and historic Syria – all this was part of the Mamluk empire so Cairo was a very important city. So the Mamluks invested in very important monuments in the city. When patrons have money and they invest this is when all the genius and the beauty of design occurs. There are beautiful murakami, gypsum inscriptions and the minarets. There were all sorts of designs on stone but also on metal, wood, and marble and the beautiful mosaics we have in the mihrabs. And there are the door knockers which I love. If you go to Paris you will Door Knockers which is on show at the Mamluk exhibition in the Louvre.
Now let me turn to Bayt al-Razzaz or the House of Razzaz. It is originally a palace which was probably built around 1474. We have the endowment deed of Sultan Qaytbay who was one of the most important Mamluk rulers in Egypt who ruled for over 29 years and that is very rare for the Mamluk rulers. We have a blazer of the sultan and we have his name on the endowment deeds which state that he ordered the construction of a makan (a place).
I have been debating with friends why the sultan needed a house in the city when he had the citadel. He probably built this house so he could house his family as he requested them to travel to Egypt when he became sultan.
We have two courtyards: the eastern courtyard where most of our activities have been focused since 2004 and the western courtyard which is an untouched beautiful ruin. The last time anything happened in this ruin was 200 years ago. It has no electricity, no sewage system, totally alienated from modern utilities. I always see the difference between life and death between these two courtyards.
Wikipedia tells us – and I need to fix that page – that we have 190 rooms but we only have 105. We have five important reception rooms, 12 stair cases and would four terraces. [Image shown from 2021] I am showing you this because in March 2020, just before COVID we were hit by a massive storm and this house collapsed entirely. When this happened the entire ceilings of Bayt al-Razzaz also moved and sections from the house collapsed.
I have been working in this city since 2003 and I never thought that climate change would impact on cultural heritage as much as did in Egypt. It was just so sudden and very shocking that water, just rain, can have such an impact on the medieval city. And that is why we started thinking how can we raise funds so that we can restore this section of Bayt al-Razzaz again.
We were lucky that we teamed up with the National Trust here in the UK and we created a project with six other partners that allowed us to have enough funds to restore the urgent section of the house which is the north section. We had to dismantle the entire section and rebuild it again. So it was quite a challenge but we still had skilled labour in Egypt capable of producing such fine work, al-Ḥamdu lillāh. But I don’t know for how long. It is stone work and when it comes to traditional work and craftsmanship what do we need to do? The obvious thing is we need education, we need a second generation because most of these men are in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
We realized that we cannot rely on international grants. US Aid decided to cut funds this year. We started looking at other possibilities and that is when we decided to go and engage with the private sector in Egypt.
Because of that movement that happened to the house and because of the impact of climate change the beautiful 18th century ceilings have been affected as well. And that is why it is important that we move fast.
An international grant takes a minimum of one and a half years to two years and that is why we asked who do we have in Egypt, how can we create a project that can allow us to engage with quick funding from our own city.
I am now working on the fabulous collection of sketches by James Wild in the V & A. He is a British architect who was in Egypt in the 1840s he stayed for almost three years sketching, studying and understanding mainly residential architecture. Most of the travellers documented the religious buildings but very few documented the residential ones because probably it was not easy to access people’s homes.
We tried to engage with our community. We introduced the house to them and we introduced different activities to engage them with their heritage. If you walked in the street two years ago and asked where is Bayt al-Razzaz no one would know. But now, thankfully because of our events people know where Bayt al-Razzaz is.
One of the most important things for us is to ensure that the doors of that house remain open by creating activities and a good program that allows people to engage with it. We have monthly lectures. We have a scholar who wrote a book in one of our rooms. We finished the restoration of one section and we managed to host two young Egyptian artists for a two-month residency. I was so touched because they told me how impactful this experience was.
There are two amazing siblings, Mohammed and Hind, who are fifth-generation carpet weavers and I spoke to them about creating a carpet for Bayt al-Razzaz. The idea developed and they suggested we invite well-known designers and international designers to come and design for Bayt al-Razzaz. Here you engage with another type of audience -not just the regular ones we work with when it comes to cultural heritage. Beautiful rugs were created for the house. We auctioned all these carpets in October which allowed us to raise the funds needed and two months ago we started the restoration of the ceiling.
I am just showing you ways of thinking out of the box when grants are not accessible. We still continued doing our work and what I learned from this experience is that our public in Egypt is just waiting to be introduced. There were almost 300 people in the courtyard. I think it was one of the most beautiful nights of my life because I was so happy with how they felt that this belonged to us. It is our heritage, it is Cairo’s heritage and that is why we have a responsibility to preserve and protect this heritage.
I also wanted to speak about how in 2018 we created a project based on minbars and mosques because we noticed that most of the looted objects in Cairo were bits and pieces from minbars. Minbars are mainly made in wood with beautiful panels ebony, ivory and mother of pearl. They have a value. One piece can cost £6,000. So the value of a minbar is at least £1.5million. The looting affected even the large monuments. From 2006 to 2019, 25 Islamic monuments in Cairo were hit and vandalized and 15 only between 2011 and 2017. Even in one month in June 2014 seven monuments were affected.
It is obvious that there is a market and there is demand. Happily, now it has been reduced because nothing has happened in the past five years at least. But it was something that happens. I would say that the most important thing to do is to document and photograph for documentation. Not to create beautiful pictures but to create pictures that a drawing can be created out of.
In 2017 we decided that the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation would apply for funding from the Cultural Protection Fund here in the UK for the minbar of Sultan Lajin which is the mosque of Ibn Talun which was built in the 9th century. The sultan was hiding in the mosque and he vowed that if ever he was saved he would restore the mosque. The minbar was made in 1296. We did the documentation. It was not affected during the looting spree.
In the 19th century ,the city was very vulnerable. Many of the monuments we see today only survived because of the amazing work done by the Committee for the Preservation of Arab Art which was under the endowment ministry at the time. So we did the documentation.
It was our initiative. But the government is working on historic cities. We just wanted to create that balance between civil society and the government. And we wanted a place for us. We went and told them you are partners in this project so how about you give us a space to work from and in return we will make sure that this place will be maintained. But then the storm happened and I found myself needing to restore it. We wanted to leave our mark as the ones who are occupying the space in the 21st century. The stones are beautiful and they are all original.
*Richard Wilding originally studied Fine Art and Art History, then did postgraduate research at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and has been leading heritage preservation and documentation projects in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and North-East Syria since 2010. Richard is a heritage consultant to the Ministry of Culture in Saudi Arabia. He has recently published books about the traditional costumes of Saudi Arabia and the heritage of Mleiha in the Emirate of Sharjah, UAE. He has given lectures at the universities of Cambridge, Exeter, Newcastle, Leicester, Reading and York, and at the University of Al-Qadisiyah, the University of Diyala and the University of Babylon in Iraq.
**Omniya Abdel Barr is Head of Development at the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation (EHRF). She has a PhD in Islamic history from Provence University, Aix-Marseille. In 2014, Ominya launched projects centred around cultural heritage rescue and documentation. At the V&A, Omniya is leading a digitisation project on K.A.C Creswell’s photographs of Islamic architecture. She co-curated the first Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023, co-directed the INTO Withstanding Change project at Bayt al-Razzaz in Cairo (2022–2024) and directed the EHRF’s project Rescuing the Mamluk Minbars of Cairo (2018–2020).
