Yesterday the upper house of the Egyptian parliament, the Shura Council, was engulfed in flames. The century-old building, or at least its upper floors, have been completely destroyed and the fire threatened to spread to the lower house of parliament, the People’s Assembly. These institutions are among the oldest representative assemblies in the Arab world, since Egypt has had some form of at least consultative parliamentarism since around the 1870s, before many European countries.
Unfortunately, many Egyptians don’t put much stock in parliament these days, which is often seen as a den of thieves, corrupt businessmen-MPs, or just plain ineffectual. Several times last night as I went out to see the blaze I heard people make jokes about how they hoped the senators where still in there (especially Safwat al-Sherif, the head of the Council) or how this was revenge for the highly unpopular new traffic law. Although it was announced early on that the fire was caused by an electrical problem, there is an automatic rejection of this explanation (although no other explanation is offered. An investigation is underway, and four people were hospitalized yesterday.
Of course in the current fin-de-regime atmosphere, some would like to think that an Egyptian Guy Fawkes was behind this. The leftist paper Al Badeel was censored last night because of its coverage of the fire. But considering that electrical fires are incredibly common, having been the cause of major train and ferry disasters in the last few years, the official explanation remains plausible.
As I went out last night and took pictures of the blaze, I noticed that inside the parliamentary compound not everyone was busy trying to put out the fire (which took nine hours, since there is so much wood in the structure). The employees below obviously had greater priorities.
It’s a shame it was a really beautiful building, are there any accounts of the damages?
the building is now as empty a shell as the body it houses. and it was good to see such a carnival atmosphere, kind of gives you hope that when He perishes, the streets will be full.
Scratching my head this morning. Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee, but when we say “oldest representative assemblies in the Arab world” we mean.. well, what do we mean exactly? Surely there have been all kinds of tribal councils and so on since Moses and Mohamed and that crowd were leasing their respective hordes across the sand. Maybe the oldest [where they sat upstairs]? How about the oldest [housed in a rickety old wooden building with crap wiring]?
And what’s this about “before many European countries”? Name a European country that hadn’t employed a representative assembly – representing at least as broad a swathe of interests as the venerable Egyptian version – by 1770 and I’ll eat one of my socks. That’s right. A dirty one, straight from my foot.
A shame that another (presumably nice – I haven’t been inside) old building has burnt down. But hey, they did ok rebuilding the old opera house after that “electrical fire,” so have no fear. Perhaps the replacement will ease the parking situation in Garden City.
I was downtown between 4 and 6 pm and saw the fire, it didn’t look like regular wood and wallpaper burning, it looked more like an oil well burning and so at first I thought that a gas station must have caught fire. I don’t really buy the government’s story that it was due to some bad electric wires, this looked very much like arson.
Oh those evil Islamists!! Burn them too, I say!! How dare they pray on the job? Incidentally, what was their job? What were they supposed to be doing in a blaze that couldn’t be stopped for a full nine hours?
@ MC above: I meant the oldest modern parliaments in the Arab world, not just vague notions of “Shura” and so on. Many European countries were less formally democratic than Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century, and of course during the fascist period in Europe. Not to mention other areas, for instance Egypt had universal suffrage (for men and women) in the 50s, Switzerland only allowed women to vote in 1974.
@ Cosmic: I was waiting for you to react to that! This is not anything against Islamists or praying, but surely you can acknowledge it’s a bit odd to pray in front of a massive fire.
i don’t know, it makes more sense to pray to a fire than most other things, like a block of rock in another country for instance.
As I tried to say, no, not at all, given that they pray during war and have set formulas for doing so.