Egypt » Introduction of Cairo

The doppelganger streams of Egypt's olden times meet just below the Delta at Cairo, where the greatest city in the Islamic world sprawls across the Nile towards the Pyramids, those supreme monuments of antiquity. 

Every visitor to Egypt comes here, to reel at the Pyramids' baleful mass and the seething immensity of Cairo, with its bazaars, mosques and Citadel, and extraordinary Antiquities Museum. It's equally unfeasible not to find yourself carried away by the street life, where medieval trades and customs coexist with a modern, cosmopolitan mix of Arab, African and European influences. Cairo has been the major city in Africa and the Middle East ever since the Mongols wasted Imperial Baghdad in 1258.

Acknowledged as Umm Dunya or "Mother of the World" by medieval Arabs, and as Great Cairo by nineteenth-century Europeans, it remains, as Jan Morris writes in Destinations, "one of the half-dozen super capitals that are bigger than themselves or their countries the focus of a whole culture, an ideology or a historical moment".

As Egypt has been a award for conquerors from Alexander the Great to Rommel, so Cairo has been a hinge of power in the Arab world from the Crusades to the present day. The ulema of its thousand-year-old Al-Azhar Mosque (for centuries the foremost centre of Islamic intellectual life) remains the eventual religious power for millions of Sunni Muslims, from Jakarta to Birmingham. Wherever Arabic is spoken, Cairo's artistic charisma is felt. Every filament of Egyptian society knits and unravels in this febrile megalopolis.