The Cairo Trilogy

Three generations of the al-Jawad family live out Egypt's early-twentieth-century upheavals within a few crowded lanes of medieval Cairo, in the al-Gamaliya quarter around Bayn al-Qasrayn, the great al-Husayn mosque and the bazaars. The whole trilogy turns on a handful of real streets a walker can still trace.

al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad

Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk)

Palace Walk

The family house on Palace Walk is the fixed centre of the trilogy, ruled by the patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad, whose iron authority at home masks a double life outside it. From its latticed windows the women watch a street they are forbidden to walk. The lane is real, a ceremonial spine of Fatimid Cairo still lined with medieval facades.

Palace Walk (Bayn al-Qasrayn), volume 1

explicit Bayn al-Qasrayn is a real stretch of al-Muizz Street in medieval Cairo and gives the first volume its Arabic title; the al-Jawad family home is a fictional house sited on this named street, so the point sits on the Bayn al-Qasrayn reach by the Qalawun complex.

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