Cairo: A Thousand Years of Islam

Today Khan el-Khalili covers several city blocks and contains thousands of individual stalls and shops. The goods on offer span the full spectrum of Egyptian and Islamic material culture: gold and silver jewellery worked in intricate filigree patterns, spices in bright pyramidal piles — cumin, coriander, saffron, dried hibiscus for the drink karkade — perfumes and essential oils, incense, papyrus paintings, alabaster carvings, hand-blown coloured glass lanterns in the Fatimid style, bolts of woven fabric, and souvenirs ranging from the genuinely beautiful to the enthusiastically kitsch. The deeper you walk into the covered alleys away from the main tourist thoroughfares, the more the market becomes a working commercial centre for Egyptian traders rather than a showroom for visitors.

Weave into the narrow alley off the main square and you will find the Fishawi Café — a long, mirrored tea-house that has been continuously serving customers since seventeen seventy-three, making it one of the oldest operating cafés in the world. The walls are hung with antique clocks and mirrors, the air heavy with the sweet smoke of shisha pipes and the sharp scent of cardamom tea. For most of the twentieth century, the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz came here almost every evening, sitting at his corner table, drinking tea, listening, and writing. His Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street — is set in the alleys and houses of this exact neighbourhood, the Gamaliya quarter, and reading it will make this whole walk come alive in a different register.

The haggling etiquette of Khan el-Khalili has its own grammar. A quoted price is not a price; it is the opening line of a conversation. Counter-offering at roughly half the first quote is standard practice. Accepting the first price without negotiation is considered, by some vendors, almost rude — a missed opportunity for the social ritual of bargaining that has been taking place in this square for six centuries. Take your time. Drink the tea that will be offered to you in small glass cups. The market rewards slowness.

The Fatimid dynasty who built this mosque were Ismaili Shia Muslims, and they claimed to have obtained Husayn's head from its previous resting place in Ascalon — present-day Israel — when the Crusaders threatened to desecrate it. Whether the reliquary actually contains what it claims is, to put it diplomatically, disputed by historians. But that debate is entirely beside the point of what this place means to millions of believers. The faithful come from across Egypt, from across the Muslim world, to pray here and to be close to the presence of Husayn.

The square outside the mosque is in a state of continuous low-level festival. Vendors of moulid sweets — elaborately decorated sugar figures on sticks, sold at religious celebrations — compete with sellers of prayer beads and religious cassettes. Religious chants and Quranic recitation pour from speakers in the minarets. Pilgrims from Upper Egypt, from Sudan, from Morocco, from Indonesia — distinguished by their dress and their languages — move through the crowd with the focused purposefulness of people who have traveled very far for this moment.

Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter the mosque interior. But the square itself is one of the great social spaces of Islamic Cairo — the place where the neighbourhood gathers, where families come on Friday evenings, where the city's emotional temperature can be taken. Stand here for a few minutes and watch the human traffic. This is as far from the tourist Cairo of the hotel district as it is possible to be while still being in the same city.

Today Al-Azhar University has around forty thousand students studying not just Islamic theology and jurisprudence but medicine, engineering, sciences, and the humanities. Its graduates go on to lead mosques, write fatwas, and shape Islamic intellectual life across the globe. When Al-Azhar issues a religious ruling, it carries weight for the majority of the world's one point eight billion Sunni Muslims. No other institution in the world has that kind of continuous intellectual and spiritual authority over that many people.

Step inside the mosque — non-Muslims are welcome during visiting hours, shoes off at the entrance. What you encounter is one of the most layered architectural spaces in Islamic Cairo. The original Fatimid structure was modest; every subsequent dynasty that ruled Egypt added to it. Mamluk sultans added minarets in a competition of piety and prestige. Ottoman governors added a portico. The result is a forest of architectural periods: Fatimid arches, Mamluk domes, Ottoman details, all cohering somehow into a single overwhelming space.

The prayer hall's forest of columns includes Roman-era columns salvaged from earlier pagan and Christian structures — the medieval builders of Cairo were expert recyclers, incorporating ancient stonework into new Islamic monuments throughout the city. Look at the column capitals: some are clearly classical, repurposed from buildings that predate Islam by a thousand years. The medieval builders saw this not as incongruity but as continuity — the stones of the past consecrated to the service of the present faith.

Walking from north to south, you pass the Mosque of al-Hakim — built between nine eighty and one thousand and thirteen by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, one of the most bizarre and terrifying rulers in Egyptian history, who banned the making of shoes for women to prevent them leaving the house, ordered all dogs in Cairo killed, and was eventually assassinated — possibly by his own sister. His mosque stood in ruins for centuries and was restored in the nineteen eighties by the Dawoodi Bohra community, an Ismaili Shia sect from India who regard al-Hakim as a divine figure.

Further south is the Mosque of al-Aqmar — 'the Moonlit' — built in eleven twenty-five, the oldest surviving mosque in Cairo to have a decorated stone facade. Its carved stone front is a landmark in Islamic architecture: the first mosque in Egypt to break from the tradition of plain exterior walls.

Then comes the Qalawun complex — built in twelve eighty-five by the Mamluk sultan Qalawun, containing a mausoleum, a madrasa, and a hospital (maristan) that provided free medical care to Cairo's population for centuries. The hospital's endowment document, still preserved, specifies that it must treat the rich and poor alike, that music must be played to soothe the patients, and that the doctors must not accept payment.

The street was pedestrianized and restored in two thousand and eight. At night, lit by lanterns and free of traffic, it is one of the most extraordinary urban experiences in Egypt — a living museum that has never stopped being used.

The two minarets that rise from the towers are not original Fatimid construction: they were added in the early fifteenth century by the Mamluk sultan Mu'ayyad Shaykh, who was briefly imprisoned in the gate before becoming sultan and vowed to build a mosque there if he gained his freedom. He gained his freedom, became sultan, and built the Al-Mu'ayyad Mosque immediately inside the gate, attaching its minarets to the top of Bab Zuweila's towers — an act of architectural audacity that gives the gate its distinctive silhouette today.

The gate served as the place of public execution throughout the Mamluk period. Condemned criminals, rebels, and enemies of the state were hanged or decapitated here before the assembled populace of Cairo. The most historically significant execution took place in fifteen seventeen: Tuman Bay II, the last Mamluk sultan of Egypt, was brought here after his defeat by the Ottoman Sultan Selim I — who had invaded Egypt, destroyed the Mamluk army at the Battle of Ridaniyya, and ended the Mamluk Sultanate that had ruled Egypt for two and a half centuries. Tuman Bay was hanged from this gate. His body was left hanging for three days as a demonstration of Ottoman power. The Mamluk era was over. Egypt would remain an Ottoman province for the next three hundred years.

The gate is also associated with a darker legend — Mu'allaq Zuweila, a craftsman supposedly walled alive in the foundations during construction, whose ghost is said to haunt the gate. Gate-legends involving human sacrifice in the foundations appear in building traditions from Ireland to China, and whether or not anyone was actually entombed here, the legend tells you something about how medieval Cairenes understood the power of this threshold between the city and the world beyond its walls.

The technique is appliqué: layers of coloured fabric are cut precisely and stitched onto a backing, building up intricate geometric designs that play with positive and negative space in ways that echo the geometry of Islamic architectural decoration — the same mathematical patterns you see in the carved stone of mosque facades appear here rendered in cotton and silk. Large ceremonial panels can take months of work by a single craftsman. The calligraphy panels — verses from the Quran worked in fabric — require a particular combination of draftsmanship and stitching skill that takes years to acquire.

The market is a long covered alley, perhaps a hundred metres, its workshops opening directly onto the passage so you can watch the craftsmen at work in their tiny spaces — cross-legged on low benches, the panels spread across their laps, needles moving with a speed and precision that makes the complexity of the work seem almost casual. Some of the workshops have been in the same family for generations.

This is one of the few places in Cairo where you can buy genuinely handmade traditional Egyptian craft at fair prices — the work is priced according to its actual complexity and labour, not according to tourist expectations. A small appliqué panel makes one of the most honest souvenirs you can take from this city: a piece of a living craft tradition that is, frankly, endangered by cheap machine-printed imitations flooding the souvenir market. The craftsmen here are keeping something alive.

The mosque he built reflects his roots and his ambitions. It was built not in the Egyptian tradition — stone construction, hypostyle prayer halls adapted from Fatimid and later traditions — but in the Iraqi Abbasid style, using fired brick rather than stone. The model is the great mosques of Samarra in Iraq, the Abbasid capital: vast enclosures, stucco decoration, and a distinctive spiral minaret. Ibn Tulun's spiral minaret — the only one in Egypt — echoes the famous Malwiyya minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, and its presence here is a deliberate architectural statement: this is an Iraqi monument transplanted to Egyptian soil.

The mosque covers twenty-six thousand square metres — one of the largest mosques in the world by area. After Ibn Tulun's dynasty ended in nine hundred and five, the mosque fell into disuse and neglect, used at various times as a warehouse, a caravanserai, and, according to tradition, a holding place for Crusader prisoners. In the late thirteenth century, the Mamluk sultan Lajin took shelter in the abandoned mosque while fleeing enemies who had accused him of murder. He vowed that if he survived and became sultan, he would restore the mosque. He survived, became sultan in twelve ninety-six, and restored the mosque — a beautiful story about vows and architectural patronage that may even be true.

The courtyard you stand in now is a masterwork of geometric restraint: a vast square of pale stone, open to the sky, the stucco-decorated arcades on all four sides, the domed fountain pavilion at the centre. The ornamental stucco panels that run along the interior of the arcades are among the finest surviving examples of Abbasid decorative art. Stand here quietly. The city falls away.

Major John Gayer-Anderson Pasha arrived. He was a British army officer, a collector of obsessive energy and highly personal taste, who had served in Egypt during the First World War and could not leave. He negotiated a lease on the two houses from the Egyptian government in nineteen thirty-five and spent the next seven years restoring and filling them with what can only be described as his vision of the perfect Islamic domestic environment — a vision assembled from antique dealers across Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, and Persia.

The result is a fantasy of Islamic domesticity: rooms lined with Damascene tiles, Iznik ceramics on the shelves, Persian carpets on the stone floors, mashrabiya screens filtering the light into intricate geometric shadows, a rooftop terrace with views over the mosque courtyard, a hall of Persian miniatures, a room of ancient Egyptian antiquities, a Byzantine room, a Queen Anne room that sits incongruously among the arabesque plasterwork like a polite English ghost. Gayer-Anderson had excellent taste and no apparent concept of coherence, and somehow the combination works perfectly.

He also had an eye for glamour. The houses were used as the villain's lair — the headquarters of the assassin Anya Amasova's pursuer — in the nineteen seventy-seven James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, a choice that says everything about how the interior photographs.

Gayer-Anderson left Egypt in nineteen forty-two, donating everything — the houses and their entire contents — to the Egyptian state. He is buried in Cairo. The museum is a monument to a certain kind of Orientalist sensibility that is deeply complicated by history — and also genuinely beautiful.

The plan is a cruciform arrangement: four great iwans — vaulted halls open at one end — facing onto a central courtyard, each iwan representing one of the four Sunni schools of Islamic law (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali). Between the four iwans, in the corners, are four smaller courtyards surrounded by cells stacked four storeys high where the madrasa students lived and studied — several hundred students simultaneously, their cells still visible if you look up from the corner courtyards.

The main entrance portal is a masterwork of Mamluk carved stone: geometric muqarnas vaulting of extraordinary complexity fills the entrance bay, the carved stone surfaces layered like a cliff face of crystallized geometry. The main door — bronze panels inlaid with silver and gold in interlocking geometric patterns — is one of the supreme pieces of Mamluk metalwork. It was later removed by the Ottomans and reinstalled in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, where it remains. What you see now is a later replacement.

Sultan Hassan was overthrown in a coup in thirteen sixty-one, before the mosque was completed, and was murdered shortly afterward. His body was never found and was never interred in the great mausoleum he had built for himself, attached to the mosque's eastern end. The mausoleum stands empty. The mosque he never saw finished has outlasted every person and dynasty that outlived him by six and a half centuries.

The Citadel Saladin began became the centre of Egyptian government for seven hundred years. Mamluk sultans built their palaces and mosques here. Ottoman governors administered Egypt from these walls. The great description of Mamluk power was written here: in eighteen eleven, Muhammad Ali — the Albanian-born Ottoman military officer who had seized effective control of Egypt — invited the remaining Mamluk leaders to a feast in the Citadel to celebrate his son's appointment to lead a military expedition. Four hundred and seventy Mamluk grandees attended. As they filed out through a narrow passage in the citadel walls, the gates were closed at both ends and Muhammad Ali's soldiers opened fire from above. Almost all of them were killed. One Mamluk, by tradition, escaped by leaping his horse over the Citadel wall — a drop of some twenty metres, which if true says something remarkable about either the horse or the desperation of the rider. The Mamluk era ended in a blood-soaked alley.

Muhammad Ali then began the construction of his mosque, completed between eighteen thirty and eighteen forty-eight, that dominates the Citadel skyline today. He modeled it on the great Ottoman mosques of Istanbul — twin pencil-shaped minarets, large central dome, semi-domes cascading down the sides — and lined the interior with alabaster quarried from the same region of Upper Egypt that supplied stone to the ancient Egyptians. The alabaster glows with a warm translucency in the afternoon light.

Muhammad Ali is buried in a marble sarcophagus in the mosque's interior. He is not universally regarded as a hero in Egypt — his economic reforms benefited his dynasty more than the Egyptian population, and his military campaigns in Sudan involved significant brutality — but he founded the political dynasty that ruled Egypt until the revolution of nineteen fifty-two, and his transformation of a medieval provincial backwater into a modernizing state of genuine regional power is an undeniable historical fact.

Stand on the Citadel terrace and look out over the city. To the north and west, the medieval minarets of Islamic Cairo — the thousand years of stone you have spent this walk reading. Further north and west, the modern city, the office towers of downtown, the dense residential blocks stretching toward the Nile. And on the southwestern horizon, on the edge of the desert where the cultivation ends, rising above the suburban sprawl that has grown up to their base: the pyramids of Giza. Three of them, unmistakable, older than anything else you can see from here by three thousand years. Cairo is a city that has been accumulating history for a very long time, and from this terrace, you can see most of it at once.