Egypt Folklorist Bent on Saving Woodworking Art, Latticework : Craftsmanship: Balcony screens are part of the air-conditioning system, not designed to hide Arab women from view.

Asaad Nadim lives in a world of wood.

He is not a carpenter, though he knows the skills. He is a U.S.-educated folklorist who returned to Egypt to help save one of his homeland’s greatest traditions, the art of working wood well.

Business is booming.

From the palaces of Kuwait to Bahrain business centers to a Cairo apartment for newlyweds, Nadim’s creations in wood have helped inspire a renaissance in Arab tastes. Gaudy European interiors gradually are giving way to designs fit for desert living.

“Don’t let the Nile Valley deceive you,” Nadim says. “If you look at a map, the Nile is one line, the rest of North Africa a desert. We live in the desert, and we must build for the desert, find a living environment suitable for the sand and heat.”

Ancient Egyptians devised simple ways to keep cool. They slept on rooftop terraces, formed fans of ostrich feathers, lounged beneath makeshift shelters of wet papyrus.

But it was the Arabs, a desert people forced into city life, who developed more sophisticated ways to beat the heat. And wood proved an efficient weapon.

Because Egypt had few trees, the elegance was expensive.

Egyptians had imported wood from Africa and their Mediterranean neighbors since the Pharaohs, who used their limited supplies to make precious things. Tutankhamen’s tomb contained masterpieces in wood, many covered with gold leaf.

When the Arabs arrived 2,000 years later, they incorporated that flair for beauty with their need to keep cool.

They turned mainly to mashrabeya , latticework wooden screens or projecting windows that from the Middle Ages became traditional features in Egyptian houses and places of worship.

Designs are as varied and intricate as snowflakes. A square yard of mashrabeya can contain 2,000 wooden pieces.

Asaad Nadim’s office is dominated by such a mashrabeya screen, designed to filter and tame incoming sunlight while catching stray breezes from the nearby desert.

Unfortunately, he says, mashrabeya suffers from a bad reputation.

“The West long has misunderstood mashrabeya ,” he says. “Outsiders think Arabs used screened-in balconies only to keep their women away from public view. That’s not the point.”

Mashrabeya allows privacy the same as modern reflective glass. But latticework also served a more crucial function.

Along with domed ceilings, wood paneling, interior courtyards with fountains and elevated wind-catching devices, mashrabeya became the Arabs’ air-conditioning system. Earthenware jars placed in a niche adjacent to the latticework refrigerated their drinking water.

An artist creates a mashrabeya screen by taking a small piece of wood, rounding and carving it, then another and another, finally joining the beads with wooden links to form a design. The latticework fits so perfectly, nails and glue aren’t needed.

Nadim, an expert on the history of the art, says wood and the Arabs were inseparable until 1798, when Napoleon marched his troops into Egypt. A lust for things European submerged traditional arts.

By the 1930s times were so bad for wood craftsmen that many starved.

“Those who could adapt did, but by turning out tourist items for Cairo’s bazaars. Junk,” Nadim says.

His love of wood began when he made a documentary film on traditional Egyptian folk art. Then in 1978, as a student in Indiana University’s folklore department, Nadim made Egypt’s folk art the subject of his doctoral thesis. He scoured villages, desert monasteries. He studied Cairo’s ancient churches and mosques, treasure houses of wooden handicraft.

He made wood his life’s work.

“But it wasn’t enough only to make the products,” he says. “I wanted to save the traditions.”

He brought apprentices to work alongside master craftsmen.

Nadim’s first workshop was a one-room basement dive with four craftsmen. Today his five-story factory, the National Art Development Institute of Mashrabeya, employs 240.

They make rooms of wood or a single screen. Nine stories of mashrabeya to decorate a courtyard or a latticework table to hold a copper tray. A dining room chair with latticework back, a carved door. Or 50 carved doors for one palace, each different.

Rich customers prefer items in ebony or teak. But most furnishings are carved from imported beech, sometimes oak from France, walnut from America.

Nadim’s favorite sources are heavy beams and wood paneling from demolished houses of 150 to 200 years ago.

“A treasure,” he says.

Many items find their way to the Persian Gulf emirates, particularly Kuwait, where Nadim’s pieces for a prince’s palace first appeared in 1980.

“It’s strange because it was princes who first made mashrabeya great,” he says. “Now today it’s the palaces that are helping to keep it alive.”

Wood craftsmanship flourished in Egypt under the Mamluks, the slave warriors--mostly Turks--who ruled in Egypt from 1250 to 1500 and often amassed large fortunes. The Mamluks used wood to make Cairo a showplace of palaces adorned with mashrabeya and elegant wooden home furnishings.

Nadim says there is a good reason that woodcraft and Islam developed together.

Islamic artists were forbidden to use the human form in artwork, but wood craftsmen had no problem creating exquisite pieces. They turned for inspiration to floral designs, stars, Arabic writing and geometric patterns, intertwining the woodwork into mystical shapes.

Pondering what to call such wonders, the West named it arabesque.

In Cairo, an endless source of designs in wood, mashrabeya is found along narrow back streets where latticework balconies shade medieval thoroughfares.

Wooden masterpieces are found in the city’s Islamic museum and in old Arab houses converted into museums. Christian artists, often in the employ of Muslim pashas, were noted wood craftsmen. Their work, some with latticework crosses, is featured in one wing of Cairo’s Coptic Museum.

But to save Egypt’s woodworking legacy, Nadim has had to adapt.

Traditional wood craftsmen used their toes to speed up the turning and carving process. Electric machines aid Nadim’s craftsmen. But, he says, “only when they don’t interfere with the artist’s creativity.”