Travel to Cairo

Cairo earns its epithet ‘the city of a thousand minarets’ honestly—the skyline bristles with towers spanning a millennium of Islamic architecture. Yet the city’s story predates even its 969 CE foundation by centuries. The Romans built Babylon Fortress here in the 1st century, establishing a strategic garrison at the junction of Upper and Lower Egypt. When Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘As conquered Egypt in 641, he founded Fustat just north of those Roman walls. Three successive capitals rose and fell on this ground—al-‘Askar in 750, al-Qata’i in 868—before Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli established al-Qahira, ‘The Victorious,’ as the new seat of the Shi’a caliphate in 969.

What survives today represents an extraordinary palimpsest of power spanning every major Islamic dynasty. The Fatimids built the great Al-Azhar Mosque in 970—still functioning as one of the world’s oldest universities and a center of Sunni theological scholarship. They enclosed their royal city within stone walls whose monumental gates, Bab al-Futuh and Bab Zuweila, still stand as imposing landmarks. Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty added the commanding Citadel fortress in 1176 atop the Mokattam hills. The Mamluks, former slave-soldiers who seized power in 1250, transformed Cairo into the largest and wealthiest city in the medieval world outside China, adorning it with monuments of unprecedented sophistication. UNESCO inscribed Historic Cairo as a World Heritage Site in 1979.