User:Tariqabjotu/Cairo

History

Initial settlements

A rendition of Fustat from A.S. Rappoport's History of Egypt

The area around present-day Cairo, especially Memphis had long been a focal point of Ancient Egypt due to its strategic location just upstream from the Nile Delta. However, the origins of the modern city are generally traced back to a series of settlements in the first millennium CE. During the 2nd century, as Memphis was declining in importance, the Romans established a fortress town along the east bank of the Nile River. This fortress, known as Babylon, remains the oldest structure in the city. It is also situated at the nucleus of Egypt's Coptic Christian community, which separated from the Roman and Byzantine church in the late 4th century. Many of Cairo's oldest Coptic churches, including The Hanging Church, are located along the fortress walls in a section of the city known as Coptic Cairo.

After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641, Ummayad commander 'Amr ibn al-'As established Fustat just north of Coptic Cairo and Babylon. The new city replaced Alexandria as the capital of Egypt as Umar did not want the Nile to separate the capital from Arabia. The city became a regional center of Islam and home to the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As, the first mosque in Africa. When the Abbasids usurped the Ummayads in 750, they moved the capital to al-Askar, which they built just north of Fustat. In 868, under the Tulunids, Egypt's capital was moved further north to al-Qatta'i. However, in 909, the Abbasids re-occupied Egypt and, in retaliation, destroyed al-Qatta'i and re-established Fustat (which had become indistinguishable from al-Askar) as the capital.

Cairo, Fatamid capital

In 969, led by General Gawhar al-Siqilli, the Fatamid Caliphate conquered Egypt and established a new fortified city northeast of Fustat. It took four years for Gawhar to build the city, initially known as al-Manṣūriyyah, which was to serve as the new capital of the caliphate. During that time, Gawhar also commissioned the construction of al-Azhar Mosque, which developed into the second-oldest university in the world. Cairo would eventually became a center of learning, with the library of Cairo containing as many as two million books. When Caliph al-Mu'izz li Din Allah finally arrived from the old Fatamid capital of Mahdia in 973, the city was given its present name, al-Qahira ("The Victorious").

For nearly two hundred years after Cairo was established, the administrative center of Egypt remained in Fustat. However, in 1168, the Fatamids set fire to Fustat to prevent Cairo's capture by the Crusaders and permenantly moved Egypt's capital to Cairo. Cairo eventually expanded to include the environs of Fustat and the previous capitals of al-Askar and al-Qatta'i.

In 1250, the slave soldiers or Mamluks seized Egypt and ruled from their capital at Cairo until 1517, when they were defeated by the Ottomans. The city’s population was decimated by plagues, including the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348. By the 16th century, Cairo had high-rise apartment buildings where the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were rented out to tenants.

Napoleon's French army briefly occupied Egypt from 1798 to 1801, after which an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army named Muhammad Ali Pasha made Cairo the capital of an independent empire that lasted from 1805 to 1882. The city then came under British control until Egypt attained independence in 1922. Under the British, Cairo's European population (30,000, or 6% of the city's population in 1897) dominated big business.