The cane chairs and umbrella still stand in the courtyard of Hussein Omar's family mausoleum, where his grandmother came every morning for 19 years after her daughter — his mother — died. Near her grave, she would sit and pray under the date palm and among the flowering plants, a few hours of peace in Cairo 's historic City of the Dead.

Now the mausoleum, built in 1924 in a neo-Islamic style and housing the graves of a number of prominent Egyptians from a century ago, is threatened with demolition.