Rab’aa Mosque today“The mosque evokes death, bloodshed and tangible grief.” Standing in the hot Cairo sun, looking at the everyday scene outside the Rab’aa el Adawayya mosque, my friend’s words at first strike me as incongruous. But almost immediately my mind flashes back to the same spot a year ago, where I had stood gazing with horror at the blackened facade of the burnt out shell left by the Egyptian Army’s violent clearance of the huge pro-Morsi protest camp which had grown up around the mosque - which I wrote about on openDemocracy at the time, and the sheer scale and brutality of which Human Rights Watch has since documented in detail.
Up until the August 2013 massacre, the Rab’aa mosque had been a landmark and community hub at the crossroads of two major arteries in Cairo’s sprawling northern suburb of Medinet Nasr (Victory City). Its brilliant whitewashed walls had always stood out from the drab concrete and brick of the surrounding tower blocks – and also from the ‘army standard’ ochre wash of the many military installations in the area. The throngs of locals streaming in and out of the mosque’s open, airy arches, and the gates of the hospital building within its walls, likewise contrasted sharply with the military sites’ blank, forbidding walls and guarded entry points.
Before and afterNow, a year later, the scene seems barely recognisable from the scorched battlefield I had stood in. There is barbed wire, and lines of military tanks, positioned in selected locations to ward off trouble and protect military installations. The streets surrounding the crossroads have also been given a facelift with more streetlights, large advertising billboards and plants to add a splash of colour to the location. Walls protecting military buildings, once littered with revolutionary graffiti, seem to have been hurriedly washed and waiting to be given a fresh coating of colour.
