Most cities grow outward from a centre. Cairo was founded five separate times, each new capital built just north of the last, and the result is that walking north through the old city is walking forward through a thousand years.

Babylon

The Romans fortified a point on the east bank around 300 AD, where the Nile met a canal running to the Red Sea. The fortress of Babylon — the name probably a corruption of an Egyptian phrase rather than a reference to Mesopotamia — became the centre of a Christian community, and its walls still stand around Coptic Cairo.

Fustat, 641

Amr ibn al-As took Egypt for the Rashidun caliphate in 641 and founded a garrison town beside the fortress. Fustat probably means the tent — his own, pitched on the spot.

It grew into a large and prosperous city with multi-storey housing, and it was the capital for over three centuries. In 1168 the vizier Shawar ordered it burned to deny it to the approaching Crusaders; it never fully recovered. Its site is now the district holding the NMEC and the potters’ quarter.

The Mosque of Amr ibn al-As, founded 641, is the oldest in Africa, though nothing original survives.

Al-Askar, 750, and al-Qata’i, 868

The Abbasids took over and built their own administrative town, al-Askar, just north of Fustat. Nothing of it remains.

Ahmad ibn Tulun, sent to govern in 868, stopped remitting taxes and built his own capital, al-Qata’i, north again. The only thing left of it is his mosque of 879, which is the oldest in Cairo surviving in its original form.

Al-Qahira, 969

The Fatimids, an Isma’ili Shia dynasty from North Africa, conquered Egypt in 969 and founded a walled royal city north of everything that existed — al-Qahira, the Victorious, from which the European name Cairo derives.

It was initially a closed palace-city for the caliph and his court, not a public town. Al-Azhar was its congregational mosque, founded 970, and teaching began in 975.

The walls and gates you can still walk — Bab al-Futuh, Bab al-Nasr, Bab Zuweila — are from the rebuilding of 1087, and Al-Muizz Street is its main axis.

Saladin, 1171

Salah al-Din abolished the Fatimid caliphate, restored Sunni Islam, and — crucially — opened the royal city to everyone, merging it with Fustat into a single urban area. He began the Citadel in 1176 and walled the whole thing.

The Mamluks, 1250–1517

Slave soldiers who took power and held it for two and a half centuries. Under them Cairo became the largest city west of China, with perhaps half a million people, and the great age of its architecture.

Almost everything you admire in Islamic Cairo — Sultan Hassan, Qalawun, Barquq, Qaytbay — is Mamluk. The style is stone rather than brick, with striped masonry, stalactite vaulting, carved domes and enormous portals.

The Black Death of 1348 killed perhaps a third of Egypt’s population and, by leaving the state as heir to unclaimed estates, funded some of the building.

Ottoman and after, 1517

Selim I took Egypt in 1517 and Cairo became a provincial capital rather than an imperial one. It declined relatively, and much of the surviving medieval fabric survives precisely because there was less money to replace it.

Napoleon arrived in 1798 and left three years later. Muhammad Ali, an Albanian officer, took power in 1805, massacred the Mamluks in 1811, and effectively founded modern Egypt.

Khedive Ismail built Downtown as a European city in the 1860s and 1870s, bankrupting the country and precipitating the British occupation of 1882.

Since

The republic in 1953, Nasser, and a population that has gone from around two million in 1950 to over twenty million in the metropolitan area. Since 2015 the state has been building a New Administrative Capital forty kilometres east in the desert, to which the government has been relocating.

Which would make six.

Walking the layers

The sequence is legible on the ground, from south to north, and it makes a good two-day plan in itself.

Coptic Cairo for Roman Babylon and Christian Egypt. Fustat and the Amr mosque for the first Islamic capital. Ibn Tulun for al-Qata’i. Al-Muizz Street and al-Azhar for Fatimid al-Qahira. The Citadel for Saladin. Sultan Hassan and the City of the Dead for the Mamluks. Downtown for the nineteenth century.

Six centres, roughly four kilometres apart end to end, and all still standing.

Reading

Max Rodenbeck’s Cairo: The City Victorious is the best single book about the place and is worth reading before coming. André Raymond’s Cairo is the standard scholarly history. Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy is the novel of the city, set in the streets around Khan el-Khalili in the first half of the twentieth century.