One of Egypt last dyeing workshop fights to survive

Egypt’s hard-currency crisis and competition from modern factories in Asia and at home threaten one of the last dyeing workshops in Egypt but one of its owners takes comfort in the trade’s ancient resilience. Mohammad Mostafa boasts that the trade dates back 3,000 years, so it can survive anything.

“It is sick but it won’t die,” said Mostafa, who runs the grimy workshop built in 1901 along with his father and brothers. “If God is willing it will last another 100 years.”

Times are tough.

Mostafa says prices for raw materials have exploded since an uprising ousted President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, triggering political upheaval and bringing the economy to its knees.

Before those days, when protests in Tahrir Square raised high hopes of a bright future for millions of Egyptians, the small workshop used to bring in around 700 Egyptian pounds a week. That has fallen to 400.


The workshop, with its old television and water jugs covered in dirt faces fierce competition from factories in countries such as China and India. The shop, which dyes material used for shirts and sheets and other goods, takes about three days to turn around the product, relying on a father and two sons to run the show, compared with about 15 people before Mubarak’s demise.