Cairo

Based on Wikipedia: Cairo

The City That Conquered Its Own Name

When the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Saqili finished building his new capital city in 973, the caliph who arrived to claim it gave it a name that still echoes through the centuries: al-Qahira—"The Vanquisher." Some say the name honored the conquering caliph himself. Others whisper that it was the planet Mars, the red wanderer the Arabs called "the Conquering Star," that happened to be ascending in the night sky when the city's foundations were laid.

Either way, the name stuck. And Cairo has spent the past thousand years living up to it.

Today, more than twenty-two million people call Greater Cairo home, making it the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world, and the entire Middle East. The city sprawls across the landscape where the Nile Valley meets the Nile Delta—a geographic sweet spot that humans recognized as special long before anyone thought to build Cairo there.

Before Cairo Was Cairo

The pyramids of Giza stand at the edge of modern Cairo's metropolitan area. Let that sink in for a moment. The same commuters stuck in Cairo's legendary traffic jams can glance out their windows and see monuments that were already ancient when Rome was founded.

Memphis, the capital of Egypt during the Old Kingdom—roughly 2700 to 2200 BCE—sat just southwest of where Cairo stands today. For nearly three thousand years, Memphis remained one of the most important cities in the ancient world. Nearby Heliopolis served as a major religious center, home to the cult of the sun god Ra, until Persian invaders sacked it in 525 BCE. They came back and finished the job in 343 BCE.

By the time the Romans arrived, these ancient cities had faded. But the location remained strategic.

Around the turn of the fourth century, the Roman emperor Diocletian built a fortress along the Nile's east bank. The Romans called it Babylon—not to be confused with the famous Mesopotamian city, though the name's origin remains debated. This fortress sat at the entrance to a canal that Emperor Trajan had dug earlier, connecting the Nile to the Red Sea. Control this spot, and you controlled the flow of goods between the Mediterranean world and the lucrative trade routes to the east.

The Muslim Conquest and the Birth of Fustat

In 639, an Arab general named Amr ibn al-As led his forces into Egypt. The Byzantine defenders held out in Babylon Fortress for months, but the siege ended in April 641. Alexandria, Egypt's Mediterranean capital, surrendered soon after.

Now Amr faced a choice. Alexandria was a magnificent city, one of the great metropolises of the ancient world. It had a famous library, a towering lighthouse, a cosmopolitan population. It made logical sense as a capital.

Amr chose differently.

He founded a new settlement right next to the conquered Babylon Fortress, calling it Fustat—"the Tent." The name was humble, almost deliberately so. But the location was strategic genius. From here, the new Muslim administration could ship Egyptian grain directly to Medina, the capital of the growing Islamic caliphate in Arabia, using the old canal to the Red Sea. Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast, would have required a longer, more complicated supply chain.

Amr also built a mosque in his new city. The Mosque of Amr Ibn al-As still stands today—the oldest mosque in Egypt and all of Africa. The current structure dates from later expansions, but the site has been in continuous use for nearly fourteen centuries.

A Series of Cities, Each Built on the Last

What we call Cairo today is actually a palimpsest—a layering of multiple cities, each founded next to or on top of its predecessor.

In 750, the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads and established a new Islamic caliphate. The Abbasids created their own settlement northeast of Fustat, calling it al-Askar—"the Camp." It was laid out like a military installation, which in many ways it was. The Red Sea canal, meanwhile, fell into disuse, though a portion of it called the Khalij continued to supply Cairo's water for another thousand years.

Then came Ibn Tulun.

Ahmad ibn Tulun arrived in Egypt in 868 as the stepson of a Turkish military commander sent to restore order after a rebellion. Within a decade, he had accumulated enough wealth, soldiers, and political capital to become the de facto independent ruler of Egypt and Syria. In 870, he founded yet another new city northeast of both Fustat and al-Askar: al-Qata'i, "the Allotments."

Ibn Tulun built lavishly. His new city had a palace, a parade ground, a hospital, and an aqueduct. Between 876 and 879, he constructed a great mosque that remains one of Cairo's most striking landmarks. The Mosque of Ibn Tulun features a massive courtyard surrounded by covered arcades, with a distinctive spiral minaret inspired by the famous mosques of Samarra in Iraq. When the Abbasids eventually reasserted control in 905, they razed al-Qata'i to the ground. But they left the mosque standing.

The Fatimids Build the City of a Thousand Minarets

In 969, everything changed again.

The Fatimid Caliphate, which had been ruling from Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia), conquered Egypt. The Fatimids were Shia Muslims who claimed descent from Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad—a claim that put them in direct ideological competition with the Sunni Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.

The Fatimid caliph al-Mu'izz sent his general Jawhar to build a new fortified city northeast of Fustat and the remains of al-Qata'i. This city would serve as the new capital of the entire Fatimid empire. Construction took four years. The new city was initially called al-Mansuriyyah, but when the caliph himself arrived from Tunisia in 973, he renamed it Qahirat al-Mu'izz.

The Fatimids commissioned the al-Azhar Mosque, which evolved into a university—one of the oldest degree-granting institutions in the world, predating Oxford and Cambridge by centuries. The city's library eventually housed hundreds of thousands of books, making Cairo a center of learning to rival Baghdad itself.

For most of the Fatimid era, Cairo remained an exclusive royal city. The caliphs lived in a vast palace complex at the city's heart, and common people weren't permitted to enter. Fustat, meanwhile, continued to thrive as the commercial and industrial center, famous for its craftsmen and its position as the region's main Nile port.

Historical sources describe Fustat as a city of remarkable density. Multi-story apartment buildings—some as high as seven stories—housed hundreds of residents each. These communal residences may have been similar to the Roman insulae, the ancient world's apartment blocks, and they certainly prefigured the rental complexes that would become common in later centuries.

Fire, Crusaders, and the End of the Fatimids

In 1168, the Crusader king Amalric of Jerusalem marched on Egypt. The Fatimid vizier Shawar, desperate to prevent the unfortified commercial city of Fustat from falling into Crusader hands, made a terrible decision.

He set his own city on fire.

The flames didn't destroy Fustat entirely, but they marked the beginning of its long decline. Over the following centuries, Cairo—the former palace-city—absorbed Fustat's economic functions and population. The two settlements gradually merged into one.

The Crusaders never captured Cairo, but the chaos of their invasion helped bring down the Fatimid dynasty anyway. In 1169, a Kurdish general named Saladin became vizier of Egypt. Two years later, he seized power outright, establishing the Ayyubid dynasty and realigning Egypt with the Sunni Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.

Saladin transformed Cairo. In 1176, he began building the Cairo Citadel, a massive fortress on a spur of the Mokattam Hills that would serve as the seat of Egyptian government for nearly seven hundred years, until the mid-nineteenth century. More importantly, the Citadel's construction ended Cairo's status as an exclusive royal enclave. Saladin opened the city to common Egyptians and foreign merchants, spurring commercial development that would make Cairo one of the medieval world's great trading centers.

Saladin also began construction of a twenty-kilometer wall designed to protect both Cairo and the remains of Fustat on their eastern flanks, connecting them to the new Citadel. The project continued after his death, completed by his Ayyubid successors.

The Mamluks: Slave Soldiers Who Became Sultans

The Ayyubid dynasty lasted less than a century. In 1250, during the chaos of the Seventh Crusade, power passed to an unlikely group: the Mamluks.

The word "mamluk" means "one who is owned"—a slave. But these were no ordinary slaves. The Mamluks were boys, typically from Turkic or Circassian regions around the Black Sea, who were purchased young and raised specifically for military service in the sultan's army. They received elite training in warfare, horsemanship, and Islamic education. Upon completing their training, they were formally freed—but they remained bound by fierce loyalty to their military comrades and to the system that had made them.

The Mamluk system of succession was neither hereditary nor peaceful. When one sultan died, another Mamluk—usually a powerful general or court official—would seize power, often violently. Between 1250 and 1517, the throne passed from one mamluk to another through a combination of politics, intrigue, and assassination.

And yet this seemingly chaotic system produced one of the most powerful states of the medieval world.

What Cairo Means Today

Egyptians have a habit of calling Cairo simply "Masr"—which is also the Arabic word for Egypt itself. The city and the nation are so intertwined in Egyptian consciousness that they share a name. To say you're going to Masr could mean you're heading to the capital or to the country.

This conflation reflects Cairo's overwhelming dominance of Egyptian life. The city is home to more than ten million people within its official boundaries, and more than twice that in the greater metropolitan area. It contains Egypt's oldest university, its largest film and music industry (the largest in the Arab world and Africa), and the headquarters of organizations ranging from the Arab League to the African Space Agency.

The Cairo Metro, which opened in 1987, was the first metro system on the African continent. Today it ranks among the fifteen busiest metro systems in the world, with over a billion passenger rides per year.

That number hints at Cairo's greatest modern challenge: the sheer density of humanity trying to move through a city that was never designed for automobiles or subway cars. Cairo's traffic is legendary—not just congested but genuinely chaotic, operating by rules that seem to exist only in the collective unconscious of its drivers. The pollution is severe, the infrastructure strained to breaking point.

And yet the city remains a magnet. Cairo's economy ranked first in the Middle East in Foreign Policy's Global Cities Index in 2005, and first in Africa according to the International Monetary Fund in 2025. Its consumer market is massive, its location strategic, and its cultural influence throughout the Arab world remains unmatched.

The Many Names of a City

Before we leave Cairo, consider how many names this place has carried.

The ancient Egyptians knew this region as the site of Memphis and Heliopolis. The Romans built Babylon Fortress. The Arab conquerors founded Fustat. The Abbasids built al-Askar. Ibn Tulun created al-Qata'i. The Fatimids established al-Qahira—the name that stuck.

The Copts, Egypt's indigenous Christian community, have their own names for the city. One Coptic text from 1211 calls it Tikeshromi, which may mean "man breaker"—a direct translation of the Arabic al-Qahira. Another Coptic name, Elioui, descends from the Greek name for Heliopolis. Some modern Copts call it Kahi-ree, a folk etymology that supposedly means "land of sun."

People from Alexandria, Egypt's Mediterranean port city and Cairo's eternal rival, sometimes call it simply "Cairo"—pronounced with a distinctive Alexandrian accent that marks it as something slightly foreign, slightly other.

The city has been conquered, burned, rebuilt, and renamed more times than anyone can count. It has absorbed villages and swallowed neighboring settlements. It has grown from a tent city to a fortress to a royal enclave to a commercial hub to a megacity of twenty-two million souls.

Through it all, it has kept earning its name: The Vanquisher. The Conqueror. The city that endures.