The Mansion of Little Ibrahim Bey

It was the night of July 21, 1798. The fires still burned and the bodies still lay uncollected in Imbaba across the Nile from Cairo, where earlier that day the army of France had routed Egypt’s ruling Mamluk beys. Napoleon now wanted to take his prize, the city. He sent an advance force across the river led by one of his veteran commanders, Gen. Dominique Martin Dupuy.

Appointed governor of Cairo, Dupuy took up residence in the abandoned mansion of a Mamluk bey that stood at this spot, now the site of the Hilmiyya Girls Middle School.

Overall, the French were not impressed by Cairo. One volunteer in Dupuy’s 32nd Demi-Brigade complained in his letters of the stench and filth of the streets as they marched into the city. What did impress them were the grand houses of the Mamluk elite. The mansion that Dupuy moved into was “the most beautiful saray in Cairo,” the volunteer writes.

Dupuy himself showed the first symptoms of the Orientalist Allure that would seize the French during their occupation of Egypt. Ensconced in the luxurious mansion, he joked to his men, “Believe me, even surrounded by these nymphs, I’m committed to my vows to my love, Europe. I just hope that sticks.”

Bust of Martin Dominique Dupuy in the Capitole de Toulouse

Where were the owners of the mansion?

The lady of the house, Adila, was the daughter of Ibrahim Bey the Great, the Mamluk grandee who along with his partner in power Murad Bey had effectively ruled Egypt for the past decade or more. By this point, Adila had fled the city along with her father in the mass panic after the disastrous Battle of Imbaba.

Adila’s husband — Little Ibrahim Bey, as he was known — was dead. His body was floating somewhere down the Nile after his ignominious end in the same battle.

French and Arabic witness accounts all depict the Battle of Imbaba as a theater of futile courage by the Mamluks.

As the French marched through the Delta toward Cairo, Murad Bey dug in at Imbaba on the western bank of the Nile, setting up barricades where he deployed his artillery, infantry and cavalry.

Map of the battle, from the 1827 edition of “Histoire de l'expédition d'Égypte et de Syrie,” by Jean-Joseph Ader . Bibliotheque National de France. It’s often called the Battle of the Pyramids, though obviously the pyramids were way, way, way off in the distance.

When they arrived, Napoleon directed his troops toward the center of the Mamluk defenses. Murad Bey hurled his cavalry at them, hoping to break their formations. Instead, they fell in droves under heavy French fire.

“Crushed by grapeshot ... the bravest Mamluks found death” before the French lines, Capt. Nicolas-Philibert Desvernois wrote in his memoirs.

Desvernois recounted how “one daring bey, a heroic warrior,” charged at the French alongside 40 horsemen. They were magnificent, he marvelled: They gripped their sabers and bridles in their teeth and brandished pistols in each hand. Their turbans were brilliant canary-yellow cashmere. Their saddles were embroidered in gold.

“All of them succumbed.”

Page from an account of the battle by a volunteer in the French military at the time, with an engraving of a Mamluk in combat. From “Histoire d’un Regiment, le 32eme Demi-Brigade,” 1890. Bibliotheque National de France

That daring bey was NOT our Little Ibrahim Bey (or Ibrahim Bey el-Wali as he’s more properly named).

He was on the other side of the river, where most of Cairo’s male population, gripped by fear, lined the banks to watch the battle. Sufis chanted, played drums and blared trumpets, pleading to God for victory. Clerics recited the Quran and encyclopedias of the Prophet Mohammed’s Hadith to bring blessings. Little Ibrahim Bey and other Mamluk commanders crowded onto boats to join the battle, only to be met by strong winds blowing sand in their faces. 

By the time they reached the Imbaba side, the French forces had broken through Murad Bey’s barricades. The Ottoman historian al-Jabarti described the chaos:

“Everything was dark from the clouds of gunpowder and dust ... No one could hear because of the noise of gunfire. People felt like the earth was shaking and the sky had collapsed upon them.”

The moment they reached shore, Little Ibrahim Bey and those with him turned to flee again. They plunged back into the river with their horses and tried to swim back across. Hundreds drowned. One chronicler of the battle, Nicola el-Turk, tells a probably fanciful story that Little Ibrahim Bey tried to climb into a boat on the Nile, but its crew beat him back into the water with their oars, shouting, “It’s your tyranny that brought us to this!”

His body was never found.

In Egyptians’ memories of the day, his fate was sharply contrasted to the heroism of another Mamluk commander, Ayyub Bey al-Daftardar.

Two months earlier, Ayyub Bey had seen in a dream that the French were coming and that he would die in battle, the historian al-Jabarti tells us. So as the French approached Imbaba, he ritually washed himself, prayed, and proclaimed his readiness to die a martyr. Ayyub Bey was among the first to charge against the French lines, roaring at them as he galloped, “We will fill the tombs with your bodies!”

He was quickly gunned down, his body trampled under the hooves of the many horses.

“He passed as a martyr, pure and forgiven, washed in the blood of fury,” one poet wrote in a eulogy, adding pointedly: “He did not drown.”

By the evening, Murad Bey and his remaining forces had fled for Upper Egypt, and French troops were bombarding across the river into Boulaq. Along the way through Giza, Murad Bey set fire to a shipload of his own ammunition to keep it from falling into French hands. The massive fire blazing in the darkness only added to the Cairenes’ terror during that apocalyptic night. Everyone fled the city, al-Jabarti writes. The emirs rushed out their wealth and their households. The poor carried what possessions they could. “Women left walking with their children on their shoulders, weeping in the darkness.” Bandits waited outside the gates of Cairo to loot and rape those fleeing.

“What took place had never happened in Egypt before,” al-Jabarti mourns.

By the time Gen. Dupuy and men entered after nightfall, Cairo felt like an empty ghost town. A little column of soldiers in a strange city, they wound their way in the darkness through the alleyways, led by a drummer keeping the beat of the march. They quickly got lost. Exhausted, they broke into a house at around 1 a.m to wait until morning.

Once installed in Little Ibrahim Bey’s mansion, Dupuy would not have long to enjoy it.

In October, riots erupted when the French imposed new taxes. A mob at Al-Azhar Mosque surrounded the nearby house of a cleric allied to the French. Dupuy charged out to intervene with only a handful of men. When he saw the size of the crowd, he tried to pull back, only to get trapped in an alley. There, he was overwhelmed. A lance skewered him just below his armpit and sliced through an artery.

Dupuy bled to death within eight minutes, Napoleon wrote in his report back to Paris on the incident.

The French crushed the revolt over the next day or two, fanning troops through the city and even bombarding Al-Azhar at one point. Thousands of Cairenes were killed.

The location of Little Ibrahim Bey’s mansion, marked in white, as it was at the time of the French occupation — #142 on the French Savants’ map,

Over the following years of turmoil, the French were driven out of Egypt, the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul reestablished his rule, only to lose it again as Mohammed Ali Pasha seized power, making Egypt virtually independent. Over this time, Little Ibrahim Bey’s mansion changed hands several times among various occupants.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Mohammed Ali’s grandson, Khedive Abbas Hilmy I transformed this district.. First, he drained the nearby Birket el-Fil Lake, opening up a large empty space, then he tore down whatever mansions of Mamluk grandees were in his path. In its place he built his grandiose, European-style Hilmiyya Palace. Little Ibrahim Bey’s mansion was among those razed, and its plot was incorporated into the palace’s extensive gardens.

This is the 1874 map of Pierre Grande Bey. The former site of the mansion is in black, now part of the gardens next to the Hilmiyya Palace

Hilmiyya Palace, in turn, was torn down in the 1890s. The current street network was laid out, dividing up the palace and its grounds into residential blocks. The elite of the era bought them up and built a new generation of mansions.

The same area in a 1915-1921 map. The black square is the former site of Little Ibrahim Beh’s mansion, now the site of a new mansion. The Hilmiyya Palace is gone, replaced by a grid of streets.

And that brings us to this grand portal that stands before us — unidentified, unexplained and incongruous, embedded in the drab modern wall surrounding the Hilmiyya Girls Middle School.

It was no doubt once part of the entrance to the post-1890s mansion that appears in the 1915-1921 map. Unfortunately, I can’t find any record online identifying its owner. The most likely candidate is Hussein Pasha Wassif, after whom the neighboring street is named (1).

I find this a good spot to imagine the succession of architectures that would have stood here, each reflecting its particular era.

Little Ibrahim Bey’s mansion would have been a typical Ottoman-era beit (2). It gives a blank face to the outside world, presenting it only with mashrabiyya windows and spare outer walls that give no idea of the shape within. A modest entrance door leads to a narrow, bent corridor. But suddenly that opens onto a sun-lit interior courtyard and the wide, lofty expanses of reception halls laid with carpets and cushions. Overhead, an arcaded loggia suggests further spaces. The mashrabiyyas of the private harem chambers upstairs peer down from the overhangs.

Nothing is symmetrical. Discreet doorways and staircases lead to the maze of small interior chambers. Rooms are placed to catch and funnel breezes in the summer or to avoid them in the winter. Niches in the walls hide books and ewers. Within the mansion walls, inside and outside mix together in odd, unexpected ways. The cool of shade and the heat of sunshine are strategically managed, each to step in when needed and step away when unwanted, like discreet house servants.

In contrast, the mansion that eventually replaced it in the late 19th century would have been in a European style. The urban planners of the Mohammed Ali Dynasty had declared European residential architecture to the model for Egypt’s future, bringing symmetry and modernity to clear away what they considered the disorder of the past (3).

As the Egyptian Survey Department’s 1921 map shows, the mansion that stood here was a perfect square with a porch or terrace on each face. Surrounded with gardens, the mansion aims to impress the outside world, presenting it an elaborate but balanced façade. A grand staircase sweeps the visitor to the entrance. Inside, rooms branch off the entry hall with ordered symmetry, left and right, each a proper square or rectangle with a proper purpose — a salon, a dining room, a sitting room. A central grand stair leads to the private quarters of the upper floors. Everything would have been decorated in the classical revival elements of the Belle Epoque: colonnades in classical orders, a pediment for every window and every corner stacked with quoins.

This surviving portal we see here was part of a set of entry buildings at the gates of the mansion grounds, which may have included a salamlik, a salon where male guests could be received without entering the house, a common feature of mansions at the time.

This 1933 map shows the shape of the mansion even more clearly, though by this time it had been turned into a school and new buildings had been erected on the north wall. The wall of the mansion’s grounds are outlined in dark black, the mansion and the entrance portal in a lighter black

It’s something of a miracle that the portal was preserved.

It is modest in decoration — or any decorative moldings it once had have been stripped away. Its main feature is its nicely carved wooden door with a fan window above it, framed by stone pilasters on either side and by an entablature and keystone scroll on top. This sort of door arrangement was common in the late 1880s to early 1900s, and once you realize it’s a distinct element, you notice it all over the place in alleys around Historic Cairo. This one differs in that it's bigger, and the fan window above the door has been inflated into a large, grilled horseshoe arch to give a bit of grandeur.

There’s one more architectural stage at this site that’s easily overlooked: the school.

The mansion was used as a girls’ school from the early 1930s at least until 1958, according to maps from those times. Soon after, it was torn down and a new school building erected, part of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s drive to bring education to the masses.

Nasser’s regime built hundreds of these schools, working from a set of standardized models drawn up by its School Premises State Foundation, as architectural historian Mohamed Elshahed and historian Farida Makar describe in their exhibit New Schools/Future Egyptians. (A link to the exhibit page is here and Elshahed’s Instagram post on it here.)

The designs were modernist and functional, cheap to build and easy to replicate: Rows of classrooms on two or three floors in long, clean, horizontal lines, all in brick and concrete.

The physical goal was to quickly provide classroom space for hundreds of thousands of children who had long gone without schooling. The other goal was more ambitious: to create a new sort of citizen. The ever-repeating, out-of-the-kit school design was “an efficient way to assimilate a new generation of Egyptian youth into the revolutionary state’s vision of nationalism, socialism, and revolution,” Elshahed and Makar write.

Most of these SPSF schools were heavily damaged in the 1993 earthquake, and since then almost all of them have been replaced, Elshahed and Makar say.

I presume that’s the case here at the Hilmiyya Girls Middle School. Which brings us to what stands before us now. Any sleek modernism that was once here is gone. It’s replaced by the style too common in the past decades, one shaped by neglect and steady decay and rooted not in the goal of building citizens but in a general contempt for them.