The seafront mashrabiya that drew the gaze of visitors to El Quseir for over a century was first and foremost a status symbol.
Sheikh Tawfiq Ali Mustafa, supreme chief of the Red Sea branch of the Ababda tribe, wanted his house, which he built in 1907, to be seen in awe by everyone arriving at the port.
Sitting on the corniche of Egypt's oldest surviving Red Sea town, its carved wooden lattice covering nearly a third of the main facade, it was also meant to signal who ran the town and who visitors would need to see first to get anything done.
One hundred and twenty years later, the house is still there, but Sheikh Tawfiq is not, the Italian phosphate company he worked with has departed, and its colonial era ended. The pilgrims his tribe once guided across the desert have long since taken faster routes, and the town itself couldn’t be more different from the one where thousands of Hajjis embarked for Makkah each year.
What remains, in the building his grandson Moustafa Sebaq now runs as a six-room boutique hotel, is one of the last physical memories of a Quseir that mattered quite a bit to the wider Muslim world.
“The Ababda are fishermen and herders as they have always been,” Mr Sebaq told The National. “But they have also often responded to the massive changes that have happened in the area over the centuries. They guided people to Makkah once, and when that ended for them, they worked with the arriving Europeans and now they have a role in the tourism industry.”
The tribe’s arc, from pilgrimage guides to phosphate labourers to hoteliers, is also that of the town’s.
A port for pilgrims
For most of its history, El Quseir was one of the main Egyptian points of embarkation for the Hajj. The Ababda, whose lands stretch south to the Sudanese border, guided pilgrims and caravans between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea coast, taking them along the ancient road from Qena over the Eastern Desert to the sea where they sailed to Jeddah.
Under Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali in the first half of the 19th century, El Quseir also became the main port through which Egyptian grain fed the holy cities.
By the middle of the 19th century, the town had “acquired a settled population of 6,000 to 8,000 souls”, according to an account of life in El Quseir by German doctor Karl Klunzinger, who lived in the town in the 1860s.
The first blow to that world was the Alexandria-Cairo-Suez railway, Mr Sebaq said. Completed in 1858, it offered pilgrims and traders a faster overland route to the Red Sea, through Suez, which proved to be more convenient because it saved travellers the long desert journey to El Quseir.
“No one in my family today was alive for the opening of the railway, but it is still remembered in stories about the changes in the tribe’s fortunes, even as far back as that,” Mr Sebaq explains.
Klunzinger, writing shortly after, recorded the consequences with a physician's precision: “The number of the government employees was greatly diminished, that of the inhabitants sank to 1,500, whole streets were deserted and fell into ruins.”
Within a decade, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 delivered the final blow. Ships that used to anchor at El Quseir now steamed straight through to the Mediterranean.
Sheikh Tawfiq's house
It was in this shifting landscape that Sheikh Tawfiq built his house. By then, a new economy was rising along the coast, from which he was to benefit greatly. Italian geologists had begun surveying the Eastern Desert for phosphate, and in 1912 the Banco di Roma founded the Egyptian Phosphate Mining and Trading Company, opening mines and a processing plant at El Quseir that would keep the town alive for another half century.
Sheikh Tawfiq, in his role as Sheikh El Mashayekh of the Red Sea Ababda, became the local liaison, the man the Italians needed to explain their presence to the town and the man the townsfolk went to with any grievances about the Italians.
“He was the highest chief of the Ababda Red Sea branch, and that necessitated a house with a style that no one else in the town had,” Mr Sebaq said. There are other old houses in Quseir, some of them contemporaneous, but none with the mashrabiya. The sheikh died in 1960, soon after the Italians closed up shop amid a nationalisation wave under Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Sheikh Tawfiq married several times, and as his family kept growing, he needed more space to house them, so he eventually acquired another plot in Al Owaina, the neighbourhood inland where most of the Ababda still live, and the family left the old house.
By the 1960s, with his widow the last resident, the house was empty. It stayed shut, under the family's ownership, for the better part of three decades.
A Swedish rescue
The house's second life began in the late 1990s, when Peter Willem Berg, a Swedish businessman who owned a Radisson resort north of the town, decided he would restore Quseir's old houses at his own expense. Aided by locals who formed committees to carry out his plan, Berg funded a restoration of Sheikh Tawfiq’s house.
“He wanted to do the same to many houses in the city, to turn them into boutique hotels that could preserve the city's heritage by incorporating it into its tourism industry, which now was the city's main means of income,” Mr Sebaq said. “He was a good man and he wanted to lift the town up.”
Sheikh Tawfiq's house was the first, and by common assessment the most successful. The restoration was deliberately light-touch: infrastructure only, essential systems, no reworking of the original structure.
“They kept the house exactly the same as it was before, just gave it some more years to live,” Mr Sebaq said. The house reopened as a hotel in 2000.
He built a vocational training centre in the town in 2002 where young men and women were trained in computing. Some were sent to Sweden to qualify as instructors.
But heritage projects proved harder to execute and Berg’s hopes for large-scale restoration ground to a halt, leaving the town in urgent need of funds to continue his vision. Mr Sebaq last saw Berg in 2017. He looked frail and was unable to speak much, and the two have not been in touch since.
“He told me that he still hoped the town and its beauty could be saved,” Mr Sebaq said of that final meeting.
An individual future
“There is a huge emerging interest in adventure tourism, and we get a lot of people, foreigners and Egyptians, who want to explore the old city and who aren't necessarily here for this upscale five-star experience,” he said. “There is room for both in El Quseir, but what we are missing is the funds to restore the buildings.”
The house of the Ababda chief, once the point of first contact for anyone arriving in the port, is now the point of first contact for a small stream of travellers looking for something older than a resort.
Whether more of Quseir's old town survives the next few decades depends on whether anyone else follows Berg's lead. For the moment, Sheikh Tawfiq's mashrabiya is still the most conspicuous thing on the corniche, a memento from a bygone world.
