Historic Cairo is the old core of Egypt's capital that UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1979: the walled Fatimid city founded in 969, the area around Saladin's Citadel, the great cemeteries known as the City of the Dead, parts of Bulaq and Old Cairo, where the first Arab settlement of Fustat stood. Built between the Muslim conquest of 641 and the city's modern expansion in the 19th century, it holds one of the densest concentrations of historic architecture in the Islamic world: hundreds of mosques, madrasas, tombs, mansions, caravanserais and gates. Each ruling dynasty built its own quarter next to the last, so the district reads best in order, from Fustat to the Ottomans.
Fustat, 641: A Garrison Town Beside Babylon
When Arab armies under 'Amr ibn al-'As conquered Egypt, Alexandria had been the capital for nearly a thousand years. The conquerors chose a new site instead, beside the Roman-Byzantine fortress of Babylon on the east bank of the Nile. It sat where the Nile Delta meets the valley of Upper Egypt, the same strategic junction that ancient Memphis had used, and it was safe from the Byzantine fleet. Tradition says the town grew around 'Amr's tent, and its name, Fustat, is often translated as "city of the tents", though that rendering is loose.
The Mosque of 'Amr ibn al-'As, the first mosque in Egypt, was founded on the site. It has been rebuilt many times but still stands. Fustat became Egypt's main city, port and market, reaching about 200,000 people by the 12th century. In 1168, with a Crusader army marching on Cairo, the vizier Shawar ordered the unwalled town evacuated and set on fire. Historians debate how complete the destruction was, but Fustat never recovered its primacy, and today its remains lie under the Old Cairo district.
Ibn Tulun's al-Qata'i and the Mosque Finished in 879
Successive rulers kept founding new administrative towns just north-east of Fustat. The Abbasids built al-'Askar after 750, but nothing of it survives. Ahmad ibn Tulun, a Turkish commander sent from Samarra as governor in 868, made himself Egypt's de facto independent ruler and founded his own capital, al-Qata'i, in 870. Its great mosque was begun in 876, and an inscription dates its completion to April–May 879.
The Mosque of Ibn Tulun is the oldest mosque in Egypt that keeps most of its original form. It follows the Abbasid style of Samarra in Iraq, built mainly of brick with stucco-carved pointed arches around a vast courtyard. Including its outer enclosure, or ziyada, it covers 26,318 m², one of the largest mosque areas in Egypt. When an Abbasid army retook Egypt in 905 it burned al-Qata'i but spared the mosque. The domed fountain in the courtyard comes from a restoration by the Mamluk sultan Lajin in 1296, and the minaret with its external spiral stair recalls the towers of Samarra, though historians disagree over how much of it is original.
Al-Qahira and Al-Azhar Under the Fatimids, 969–1171
Cairo itself began as a royal enclosure. The Fatimids, an Isma'ili Shi'a dynasty from Ifriqiya in present-day Tunisia, conquered Egypt in 969 under Caliph al-Mu'izz. The next year his general Jawhar al-Siqilli laid out a walled city north-east of Fustat called al-Mu'izziyya al-Qahira, "the Victorious City of al-Mu'izz", which gave Cairo its name. Two palaces faced each other across a square called Bayn al-Qasrayn ("between the two palaces"). A main street, the Qasaba, ran from the northern gate of Bab al-Futuh to the southern gate of Bab Zuwayla. Ordinary people lived in Fustat, and only the court, officials and troops lived inside the walls.
The city's congregational mosque, al-Azhar, was begun in 970 and dedicated in 972, and in 989 its administrators hired 35 scholars. Al-Azhar University is regarded as the second-oldest continuously operating university in the world after al-Qarawiyyin in Fez. Under the vizier Badr al-Jamali (in office 1073–1094) the mud-brick walls were rebuilt in stone. Three of his gates survive, Bab al-Nasr, Bab al-Futuh and Bab Zuwayla, restored together with part of the northern wall between 2001 and 2003. The Fatimid mosques of al-Hakim and al-Aqmar also still stand on or near the Qasaba, now called al-Mu'izz Street.
Saladin's Citadel on the Muqattam Hills
Salah ad-Din (Saladin), a Zengid commander appointed vizier to the last Fatimid caliph, abolished the caliphate in 1171 and returned Egypt to Sunni rule under his own Ayyubid dynasty. In 1176 he began a fortified Citadel on a spur of the Muqattam Hills south of the walled city, and planned a wall about 20 km long to enclose both Cairo and Fustat. The wall was never finished, but the Citadel became the seat of Egypt's rulers for nearly 700 years, until Khedive Isma'il moved his court to the new Abdeen Palace in 1874.
The move ended Cairo's life as a closed palace city. Ordinary Egyptians and foreign merchants settled inside, Fustat declined, and the Fatimid palaces were gradually demolished and built over. Al-Azhar, founded as a Shi'a institution, lost its status as a Friday mosque under the Ayyubids. It later became the leading centre of Sunni learning.
Mamluk Cairo and the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan
Most of Historic Cairo's great monuments date from the Mamluk Sultanate of 1250 to 1517, whose soldier-sultans were bought as slaves and trained for the army. The Mamluks stopped the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260 and ended the Crusader states. Under al-Nasir Muhammad (1293–1341) Cairo may have reached about 500,000 people, often cited as the largest city outside China at the time. Wealth from the trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean paid for funerary complexes combining mosque, madrasa, Sufi lodge, public fountain and tomb. The complex of Sultan Qalawun, the madrasas of al-Nasir Muhammad and Barquq at Bayn al-Qasrayn, and the tomb complex of Qaytbay in the Northern Cemetery all date from this period. So does the market quarter of Khan al-Khalili, which grew up near al-Azhar.
The most ambitious of them is the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan on Salah al-Din Square below the Citadel. It was built between 1356 and 1363, while plague repeatedly struck the city. The building is about 150 m long, 68 m wide and 36 m high. Its entrance portal is 38 m tall, and its surviving southern minaret, whose summit stood 84 m above the street, is the tallest in Mamluk architecture. Al-Maqrizi recorded that it cost 30,000 dirhams a day to build, and more than one million dinars in total, which made it the most expensive mosque in medieval Cairo. A planned minaret over the portal fell in 1361 and killed about 300 people, and the sultan was assassinated the same year. His body was never found, so his mausoleum was never used.
Its position so close to the Citadel made it a fortress in its own right. Rebel emirs fired on the Citadel from its roof in 1391. In 1517 the last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, took refuge inside, and the Ottomans bombarded it with cannonballs.
Ottoman Cairo After 1517
Selim I conquered Egypt in 1517, and Cairo became a provincial capital of the Ottoman Empire for nearly three centuries. The governors built less than the Mamluks had, and new Ottoman buildings largely kept to local Mamluk forms. Cairo remained a major commercial city and the main staging point for the pilgrim caravan to Mecca. Many of the mansions that survive in the old city date from this period, along with numerous sabil-kuttabs, which combined a public water fountain with a Qur'an school. The 18th-century official Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda was a prolific patron and enlarged al-Azhar.
Muhammad Ali and Khedive Isma'il, 1805–1879
After the French occupation of 1798 to 1801, the Albanian-born Ottoman officer Muhammad Ali Pasha took power in 1805 and made Cairo the capital of a state that was independent in practice. He cleared many disused Mamluk buildings on the Citadel to build the domed Mosque of Muhammad Ali, which still dominates the skyline. His grandson Khedive Isma'il laid out a European-style city with boulevards to the north and west in the 1860s and 1870s. That new city became Downtown Cairo and left the historic districts to decline.
UNESCO's 1979 Listing and the Threats Since
UNESCO inscribed Historic Cairo in 1979, describing it as one of the world's oldest Islamic cities. Much of the area is still among the poorest and most crowded parts of the capital. Neglect and decay affect many buildings. After the 2011 uprising, thefts from monuments in al-Darb al-Ahmar rose, and weak zoning enforcement let high-rise blocks replace traditional houses. Thefts and illegal building have since fallen.
Restoration has followed two approaches. The government's Historic Cairo Restoration Project, launched in 1998, aimed to restore 149 monuments and had finished about 100 by 2010, mostly along al-Mu'izz Street. Critics said it turned the street into an open-air museum for tourists. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture took a community-based approach in al-Darb al-Ahmar after creating al-Azhar Park. With the World Monuments Fund it restored the 14th-century Mosque of Aqsunqur, the "Blue Mosque", between 2009 and 2015, and it completed the first phase of work on the Mosque of Amir al-Maridani in 2021. The sharpest controversy concerns the City of the Dead: since 2020 the government has demolished some historic tombs there to build highways, drawing protests from residents and conservationists.
For the modern city that grew around these monuments, see our guide to Cairo as Egypt's capital, the story behind the name al-Qahira in Cairo's name origin, and the much older landscape of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt's geography.