History Of Cairo Egypt
The area around Cairo has a much longer past than the city itself, which didn’t start to form until the Middle Ages. Ancient Egypt had several major cities, and Memphis was one of them. It was built on land that is now part of the city of Cairo.
After taking over Egypt, the Romans built a city nearby that they called Babylon. It is now in the Misr al-Qadimah neighborhood of Cairo. The next stop was the Arab who conquered Egypt and introduced Islam there, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, who built the city of al-Fustat.
But it was the Fatimid caliph al-Mu’izz who built the modern city, whose name means “the victorious” in Arabic. After being built in 969 and becoming the capital of the Fatimid Empire a few years later, Cairo has always been the political and economic center of Egypt and a very important strategic city.
The Mamluk Sultanate ruled from 1260 to 1516, and Cairo was its capital. The city did very well under Mamluk rule. By 1340, the city had grown to have half a million people living in it, making it the biggest city on three continents. It was also the most important place to learn in the Islamic world because it was home to al-Azhar University.
It was also a good place to make money from the trade of spices from Asia to the Mediterranean. The City did not have a good time during the last few years of Mamluk rule, though. There were a lot of deaths in Cairo in 1348 because of the bubonic plague. Soon after, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, successfully sailed from Europe to India, opening a seaway to the east that let the spice trade go around Cairo. This caused economic losses.
When the Ottoman Empire took over Egypt in 1517, Cairo was one of many provincial capitals in the bigger Ottoman Empire, which was run out of Istanbul. This did not help City’s situation either. For several hundred years, the city wasn’t very important. When Napoleon’s troops invaded Egypt in 1798, there were less than 300,000 people living in Cairo.
In the 1830s, though, the city began to grow again thanks to the work of Muhammad ‘Ali, who was Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805 until his death in 1849 and tried to bring the city up to date. As part of Muhammad ‘Ali’s plan to modernize Egypt, irrigation, roads, agriculture, schooling, and the military were all made better. This was good for Cairo’s economy and population.
But it wasn’t until the khedive Isma’il ruled from 1863 to 1879 that Cairo became a truly modern city. Isma’il wanted to make Cairo a European city. He started spending a lot of money that Egypt couldn’t afford, which added to the country’s huge foreign debt and gave Britain a reason to take it over in 1882.
He told French engineers to plan the building of a new city next to Cairo in the Middle Ages. He worked hard to build the neighborhoods of Abdin, al-Isma’iliyyah, and al-Ezbekiyyah, which are in the middle of modern-day Cairo. After the British took over Egypt in 1882, these new areas became the center of colonial Cairo.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the city went through more changes. The biggest was a huge increase in population, mostly from people moving from rural areas, and higher total population growth rates.
This large influx of people has made the city too crowded to handle. As a result, shantytowns have sprung up on the edges of the city, people have moved into the huge northern and southern cemetery complexes (known as the City of the Dead), and new suburbs, satellite towns, and planned communities have been built. Some examples are Heliopolis, al-Ma’adi, the Tenth of Ramadan City, and the Sixth of October City.
Still, the city, which has been called the “mother of the world” for hundreds of years, is still the heart of Egypt. Misr (Egypt) means both Egypt and Cairo to Egyptians, which shows how important the capital city is. In 1919, there was a short-lived uprising against British rule in the city. Three years later, Egypt became officially independent, though Britain still had some rights in Egypt, such as stationing troops there.
After World War II, the city was also very important in more uprisings against British rule, which went on until after the 1952 revolution. In January 1952, riots broke out in Cairo, targeting places of “foreign” influence like the British Turf Club, the Shepherd’s Hotel (which had been a hub of European social life in Cairo for a long time), movie theaters that showed foreign films, nightclubs, bars, and many businesses owned by Jews.
Later that year, on July 23, there was a revolution, which was really a military coup. It got rid of the corrupt and hated King Faruq and put in his place the good-natured General Muhammad Naguib. However, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who planned the coup, kept real power and soon took over the government by himself.
After the 1956 Suez War, Nasser’s policies of seclusion and “Egyptianization” had the same effect on Cairo as they did on Alexandria: many of Cairo’s foreign and minority people chose to leave the country. After the Camp David Accords were signed in 1979, Egypt was no longer at war with Israel. This was good for Egypt, but it was bad for Cairo’s reputation among Arab cities.
A lot of Arab countries cut diplomatic ties with Egypt, and the League of Arab States moved its offices from Cairo to Tunis. This caused a lot of Arab diplomats to leave Cairo. However, relations have been fixed since then. About 1,000 people died in an earthquake in Cairo in 1992 when badly built high-rise buildings and homes that were put together quickly fell down.
Today, close to 20 million people live in City. As the year-round capital of Egypt (since Alexandria was no longer used as the summer capital after the 1952 revolution), the center of business and industry, the home of foreign embassies, and once again the headquarters of the League of Arab States, Cairo is the political, strategic, diplomatic, economic, and cultural key to Egypt. It has been this way since the Middle Ages.
Also Read: How the Arabians Conquered and took over the Great Kingdom Of Egypt
