Seif El Rashidi, The Tapestries of Harrania

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Seif El Rashidi’s new book is the first major publication on one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable experiments in creativity and education.

Over the past 75 years, the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center in the village of Harrania, near Cairo, has been the site of an extraordinary attempt to extend the creativity of childhood across the entirety of life. Its participants, all of whom started as young children, have made wonderful tapestries and other exceptional artworks without formal training or direction, and in so doing have revealed the beautiful truth that all of us are born with the potential to be artists.

Today tapestries by the Wissa Wassef weavers grace museums in the Middle East, North America and Europe, but when the project began in the streets of Old Cairo in the early 1940s, no one could have predicted it would achieve such recognition. Then its founder Ramses Wissa Wassef was just a young architect with an improbable dream. This book tells the story of where that dream came from, how he and his wife, Sophie, realized it, and the ways in which it continues todevelop three generations later.

Seif El Rashidi’s new book is the first major publication on one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable experiments in creativity and education.

Over the past 75 years, the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center in the village of Harrania, near Cairo, has been the site of an extraordinary attempt to extend the creativity of childhood across the entirety of life. Its participants, all of whom started as young children, have made wonderful tapestries and other exceptional artworks without formal training or direction, and in so doing have revealed the beautiful truth that all of us are born with the potential to be artists.

Today tapestries by the Wissa Wassef weavers grace museums in the Middle East, North America and Europe, but when the project began in the streets of Old Cairo in the early 1940s, no one could have predicted it would achieve such recognition. Then its founder Ramses Wissa Wassef was just a young architect with an improbable dream. This book tells the story of where that dream came from, how he and his wife, Sophie, realized it, and the ways in which it continues todevelop three generations later.

About the author

Seif El-Rashidi is the Director of the Barakat Trust, London, which supports and promotes the study and preservation of Islamic art, heritage, architecture and culture for the future. He has been a technical reviewer for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s heritage projects since 2013, and was on the World Monuments Fund Project Selection Committee for 2019. He is an advisory member of the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund.

His other publications include The Tentmakers of Cairo: Egypt’s Medieval and Modern Appliqué Craft (AUC Press, 2018), which he co-wrote with Sam Bowker.

Publication: Autumn 2026