Frazer Hay in conversation with Omniya Abdel Barr, as part of 10 Stories for 10 Years.
The interview took place in London’s V&A Museum on a bright March morning. I could not think of a better place to meet Omniya Abdel Barr. I sat on an old wooden bench directly opposite the Islamic Middle East galleries, marvelling at the artefacts around me and trying not to feel overawed. On my way in, I had passed the museum’s bomb-damaged façade, still bearing the marks of the Blitz and the Second World War: a fitting reminder of why I was there on behalf of the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund, which is marking its tenth anniversary through a series of profiles of people whose work reflects its values.
The V&A, dedicated to the power of creativity, felt a wholly appropriate setting for this conversation. Omniya herself seemed completely at home there. She arrived with a graceful energy and a warm smile, and before long she was guiding me toward a magnificent minbar, explaining its history, construction, geometry and cultural significance with the ease of someone whose life has long been shaped by looking closely, thinking deeply and wanting others to see what she sees.
From time to time, naturally enough, she checked her phone. Her son was delayed at an airport in Rome, making his way back to Cairo with a large group of fellow students. Their response to the delay had been to sing, play music, dance and perform for the other travellers waiting with them. Omniya showed me a video of the impromptu airport concert with a mixture of maternal pride and creative delight that made her eyes shine. It was a lovely, telling moment: old and new, heritage and expression, care and imagination, all gathered in one place.
We moved into the museum’s research rooms and continued our conversation.
Omniya was born in Nottingham while her father was completing his PhD. Before she spoke Arabic, she spoke English. Her earliest years were marked by movement and curiosity, by education and travel, and by parents who seemed to believe deeply in both culture and adventure. When the family returned home to Egypt, they did not fly. They drove from Nottingham through Germany, bought an orange Fiat, crossed the Alps and continued to Venice, where they boarded a ship to Alexandria. She was only young at the time, but the trip lived on as a vivid family story, part fact and part legend, and one that says something important about the imaginative atmosphere in which she was raised.
‘My dad always used to say, dreams are for free,’ she told me. ‘So it’s good to use our imagination.’
That sentence feels like a key to understanding her.
Her father came from a strongly technical background. Numbers, engineering and mathematics were central to his world. Yet he was also, by her account, a deeply cultured man, determined that his children should know who they were by knowing where they came from. He took them to museums, archaeological sites, temples and historic cities. Family travel was rarely just tourism; it was education, initiation and inheritance.
One early trip proved especially formative. When Omniya was still a child, her father took her and her mother with him on a university trip to Luxor and Aswan. Her parents later told her that when they returned, ‘my eyes were different.’ They had seen in her the force of her fascination. Ancient Egypt gripped her imagination. She devoured books about it, sought out anything she could read, and became enthralled by the worlds that monuments and objects seemed able to open.
That early fascination gradually shifted. By the time she was studying architecture, it was not ancient Egypt but Islamic architecture that had claimed her most fully.
Even that choice came through a family struggle. Omniya knew she wanted to study architecture through fine arts, not engineering. Her father, loyal to the polytechnic tradition, was firmly opposed. In the Egyptian university system, students list their preferred courses and institutions according to their exam results. Omniya dutifully filled the top of her list with engineering schools to satisfy her father but tucked fine arts much lower down. In the end, her grades spared her. Had she scored slightly higher, she would have landed in engineering. Instead, she entered the Faculty of Fine Arts, exactly where she had wanted to be all along.
She remembers that outcome not as defeat, but as destiny. ‘Things happen for a reason,’ she said, with the ease of someone who has learned to recognise fate not as passivity but as permission.
Her family formed her in other ways, too. Her mother made her read widely and early. She was reading about Napoleon while still a child, opening up worlds through words and imagination. Her mother, a serious reader, seemed to understand that books offered more than information; they offered space to think, picture and wander. Omniya still speaks passionately about the importance of reading as a way of forming the mind. ‘Reading for us,’ she said, ‘was a way of opening up the world.’ What mattered was not only the knowledge a book contained, but the fact that it required you to imagine.
That point is crucial for her. Again and again, she returned to the importance of imagination: the need to create images in the mind, to hold ideas together, to begin with nothing and build something from it. In an age saturated with visual information, she worries that we have access to endless data but less and less room for thought. ‘It’s very important to keep on imagining,’ she said. ‘To use the brain to create the images.’
There were artistic influences, too. On her mother’s side of the family was a beloved great-aunt (Nenna Susu for Souraya), a painter and an unconventional, rebellious woman whose life offered a different model of possibility. Omniya spent long periods with her, absorbing the stories of her youth, her work and her refusal to be constrained by expectations. The walls around her were lined with paintings she had made herself. For a child learning how to occupy time alone, there was something deeply alluring in the idea that one could sit before a blank surface and create a world.
By her own account, Omniya was almost an only child. Her younger sister and brother, born five years and ten years later, belonged to a different phase of family life. In the meantime, Omniya learned to entertain herself through books, drawing, reading and observation.
After Nottingham and Cairo came Kuwait, where her father’s work took the family for five important years. She speaks of Kuwait as one of the formative experiences of her life. The school there was French-speaking, and it was in Kuwait that her fluency in French became fixed, a gift that would later shape her academic path in profound ways. But more than that, Kuwait offered her a wider Arab world. Her classmates came from Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria and beyond. There were French and Swiss children, too. Lunchboxes, dialects, habits and references all carried little nuances of culture. For Omniya, this produced an early and powerful sense that to be Egyptian was also to belong to a broader Arab world.
That expansive feeling never left her.
When she returned to Cairo at around ten, she entered a very different environment: the Pensionat du Sacré Cœur, a large, historic school with a scale, smell and atmosphere very different from the relatively modern world she had known in Kuwait. She loved the old architecture of the school, the church on the grounds, the sense of layered generations, the old books in the library, even the smell of them. She recognised, perhaps before she had the vocabulary for it, that places hold memory. A friend’s grandmother had once attended the same school. Books on the shelves had been printed in the 1930s and 40s. She felt part of something older than herself.
That sense deepened again when she entered the Faculty of Fine Arts in Zamalek, the island between Cairo and Giza. The campus, based around two old villas and neoclassical architecture, seemed to gather together all the young people who had felt slightly unusual in their earlier school environments. Here, she said, the weirdos were all finally in one place. People sat on the floor, drawing while listening to music. There was permission to be absorbed, eccentric and artistic.
Omniya had once thought she might become a cartoonist. She created her own comic character (Ferwiza) and magazine at school. She learned oil painting. Architecture became, perhaps, the negotiated form her creativity could take: acceptable enough to her father, expressive enough for her.
The decisive encounter came in the first year of her architecture degree, when students were sent into historic Cairo to document an old mosque. It was a shock and a revelation. The site lay deep within the commercial chaos of the city, and yet there she was, drawing, measuring and discovering monument after monument around it. In that moment, she realised she was not simply interested in architecture in the abstract. She was interested in this architecture, in this city, in this layered, pressured, beautiful, difficult urban inheritance.
That realisation shaped the rest of her life.
She went on to specialise in conservation at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where her master’s thesis focused on urban conservation in Historic Cairo through the case of the Mosque of Azbak al-Yusufi and its environment. From there, she pursued a PhD in history at Provence University in France, not architecture, but history. It was a difficult shift. She had to learn new tools, new methods and new sources, and she wrote an 800-page thesis in French. She speaks of the PhD as a trial by solitude, something one survives alone, something that leaves you altered. It gave her confidence, though not certainty. Even now, she says, she is often plagued by doubt. But perhaps, as she suggested, that doubt is part of what makes her work harder. ‘We should never be comfortable,’ she told me, ‘because otherwise we’ll never progress.’
The city that most fully occupies her intellectual and emotional life is medieval Cairo. ‘The city is my passion,’ she has often said, and it is clearly true.
For Omniya, studying Cairo’s history is not an antiquarian exercise. It is a way of understanding the present. Through studying the Mamluk period and its influence on the city, how it was built, by whom, under what circumstances, with what materials, influences and historical events, she came to see Cairo not as a static inheritance but as a product of movement, encounter and exchange. Craftspeople came from Iran, from Syria, from North Africa, from Andalusia. Influences travelled. Peace treaties shifted artistic forms. New details on domes and minbars reflected the movement of people and knowledge. Architecture, for her, becomes legible only when history and form are read together.
This matters beyond scholarship. It gives her hope. If Cairo’s greatest periods were made by people of different backgrounds, faiths and regions working alongside one another, then the narrow contemporary narratives about exclusion and civilisational purity begin to collapse. The city itself tells another story: of Jews, Christians and Muslims sharing urban life; of Christian and Jewish craftspeople working on mosques; of knowledge moving across borders and leaving beauty behind.
‘The architecture tells us these stories,’ she said.
That, perhaps, is where cultural heritage becomes most politically important. Not simply in preserving stones or facades, but in preserving evidence of complexity, tolerance, exchange and coexistence. In times of polarisation and conflict, heritage offers a longer, deeper memory. It reminds us that identities are more layered, more porous, more collaborative than many modern narratives allow.
It also creates responsibility. Omniya speaks about heritage with a very strong sense of obligation. She feels accountable to those who came before, the makers, builders, artisans and ordinary people who left traces in the city. ‘I feel I am responsible,’ she said, ‘for at least preserving the traces of these people who were there once and who left us something beautiful.’
That responsibility has shaped much of her professional life. It lies behind her work with the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation, her leadership on projects documenting and rescuing endangered heritage, her work on K.A.C. Creswell and James Wild’s archives at the V&A, her direction of the Mamluk minbars project, and her continued advocacy for the urban heritage of Cairo. It also lies behind her willingness to speak publicly, influence policy and engage not only scholars but officials, funders and wider audiences.
One dimension of that work she spoke about with particular conviction was her relationship with the Cultural Protection Fund itself. She first heard about the CPF while attending a talk at the British Museum. Afterwards, she wrote them an email. ‘And it all started from there,’ she said.
What followed was more than a funding relationship. Through the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation’s Rescuing the Mamluk Minbars of Cairo project, the CPF supported what Omniya describes as the first British-funded heritage project in historic Cairo. At a moment when Islamic monuments in the city had been exposed to neglect, vandalism and theft, particularly in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, when minbars and other Mamluk architectural elements became vulnerable to looting because of their high market value, the project enabled detailed photographic documentation of endangered minbars and other moveable heritage. It also supported restoration, study, training and public engagement. Local craftspeople and designers were able to study the restored minbars and draw inspiration from their complex geometry, while thematic workshops and training reached local professionals, volunteers, teachers and children.
For Omniya, the importance of the CPF lies not only in what it funds, but in how it works. She spoke of the Fund as a pioneer in the sector and as a leader in cultural diplomacy: flexible, adaptive, context-aware and genuinely collaborative. It was, in her view, ‘far more than just a donor.’ The relationship was not defined by the usual distance between recipient and funder, but by mutual trust and problem-solving. ‘We are there for each other,’ she said. Through the CPF, she added, she has built a beautiful network not only with the British Council, the National Trust, the International National Trust Organisation, and the British Embassy in Cairo, but also with peers and institutions further afield, including in Pakistan, Jordan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zanzibar and Syria.
Confidence, in her case, seems to have come not from arrogance but from long immersion: years of campaigning, years of speaking with ministers and governors, years of standing in threatened neighbourhoods and understanding them from the ground.
That grounding is central to what she says now about the future.
Omniya is no longer content simply to document loss. She wants to intervene structurally. Recently, she co-founded a private company with three friends in order to buy endangered historic houses in Cairo, restore them and bring them back into use. After years of working through NGO structures and being challenged by bureaucracy, she has concluded that the private sector may offer more room to act. If the house is yours, she says bluntly, you do not need to spend months chasing impossible permissions merely to use it. Her dream is not to displace the makers and craftspeople who occupy these districts, but to create a more supportive ecology around them: safer workshops, functioning infrastructure, restored houses, activated plots, and sustainable economic models that allow the neighbourhood’s culture to thrive rather than be erased.
This is, in her mind, a matter not only of preservation but of planning, use and dignity. She speaks passionately about al-Darb al-Ahmar and similar historic neighbourhoods, not as ‘problems’ to be solved by developers, but as places full of potential, creativity and knowledge. The tragedy, as she sees it, is that too many plans for the historic city are drawn by people who do not know its soul. They have not walked its streets properly, spoken to its people, understood its working lives or grasped its existing networks of making.
‘You have to walk in these neighbourhoods,’ she said. ‘You have to speak to the people. You have to understand what is important for them. And then afterwards you sit in your office, and then you draw something that is relevant to their lives, not relevant only to your ideas.’
That sentence could almost stand as a manifesto, not only for heritage work in Cairo, but for the values the Cultural Protection Fund has tried to champion over the last decade: people-centred, rooted, practical, attentive to skill, memory and local life.
Omniya’s imagination keeps moving. Alongside the house company, she has another ambition: to create, in Cairo, a kind of local equivalent to the V&A, an institution that could care for and present the creative memory of Egypt’s modern and contemporary making. Posters, textiles, drawings, wallpaper, objects, archives: the material traces of design and creativity that currently disappear because there is nowhere structured to hold and value them. She already has a building in mind. It is, for now, an idea. But as she reminded me earlier, dreams are for free.
There is something striking about the continuity in her life. The child reading Napoleon too young, fascinated by old books and school buildings; the teenager fighting to enter fine arts instead of engineering; the young architecture student measuring mosques in historic Cairo; the PhD candidate writing 800 pages in French; the public speaker, advocate, conservationist and strategist; the mother watching her son make music in an airport delay and smiling with pride, all these versions of Omniya seem connected by one thing above all: imagination put to work.
She is not interested in heritage as nostalgia. She is interested in what it allows us to build: understanding, resilience, possibility, structures that honour the past while making room for living communities and future creativity.
By the end of our conversation, it felt impossible not to see the V&A itself as part of the story. Here was a woman shaped by cities, books, archives, temples, mosques, old schools, fine arts campuses and threatened neighbourhoods, sitting within one of the world’s great museums, thinking not about possession but about possibility. How to protect. How to reconnect. How to make things happen. How to move from frustration to action. How to begin with nothing and create something.
We ended, fittingly, on the word ideas.
And perhaps that is where Omniya Abdel Barr is most fully herself: in the space where knowledge meets imagination, where history meets advocacy, and where cultural heritage becomes not only a matter of preservation, but a way of thinking courageously about the future.
Omniya was clear that the work of the Cultural Protection Fund remains crucial in today’s unpredictable and volatile geopolitical climate. If anything, she feels its importance has grown. For that reason, she believes the CPF should be protected and strengthened, with the security to continue building on its first decade without the uncertainty that so often shadows funding and job stability in the cultural sector. In her view, its legacy is not only the projects it has supported, but the networks, trust and shared purpose it has created across borders.
