At the end of the Second World War some Egyptian architects, such as Sayed Karim, sought commissions from high-ranking patrons in order to recover from several years of professional uncertainty as the war raged. The Khedive Ismail issue of al-ʿImara architectural journal (1945) opens with a letter addressed to King Farouk. The letter boasts of Ismail’s enlightenment, long-term vision and his patronage of modernization projects. Sayed Karim’s presentation of Khedive Ismail’s role in modernizing Cairo was deeply informed by the contemporary moment from which Karim was writing. In defense of Ismail, Karim writes, “Critics of the Cairo Ismail built have focused on the appearances of things and have missed the core of his urban accomplishments that laid the ground for a modern city that will function for centuries to come.” The critics Karim speaks of are Europeans who have dismissed modern Cairo as merely "an eastern city dressed in western clothing." Writing in 1945 at a time when Cairo was in need of a new wave of urban modernizations and reforms, Ismail’s Cairo presented Karim with a tangible historical precedent for what he sought to achieve. By listing the particular urban interventions carried out nearly a century earlier and pointing to their benefits on the city’s development, Karim began to develop his own list of possible interventions in 1940s Cairo. Ismail’s Cairo provided Karim with a prehistory for his urban design aspirations.