Cairo is a city full of art, architecture, design, and culture. Often people forget that this age-old city is more than its traffic and its summer heat. From Islamic architecture to Coptic architecture, to Arabic calligraphy, the Arabic letter, the street signs and corner shops, there is a lot of visual inspiration to be gained from Cairo. Egypt is, of course, an Arabic-speaking country, and while Spoken Arabic is well and good, Standard Arabic is considered to be in danger, as less and less people are unequipped to teach it, and “as it fails to modernize.” How Standard Arabic persists in Cairo is in the Art, and in the written work of the Arabic letter that manifests itself in buildings, food carts, streets signs, lamps, graffiti and old literature. As Cairo continues to “modernize” and increase its bilingual and English-spoken art and content, Arabic mostly survives in the old and tucked away. …
