Cairo

Cairo is the youngest of several cities on this stretch of the Nile. The Romans held a fortress called Babylon beside the river, and Christian churches gathered inside its walls. In 641 the Arab general Amr ibn al-As founded Fustat beside it, and the Tulunids added their own quarter in the 9th century, leaving the Ibn Tulun mosque. In 969 the Fatimids laid out a walled palace city for their caliph and army and named it al-Qahira, the Victorious — the name Europeans turned into Cairo. Al-Azhar was founded there a year later.

Saladin ended Fatimid rule in 1171, opened the princely city to ordinary people and began the Citadel on the Mokattam spur. Under the Mamluk sultans, from 1250 to 1517, Cairo grew into the largest city west of China and one of the richest, its merchants controlling the spice trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean and its sultans covering the streets with mosques, schools, hospitals and fountains. Plague and the opening of the Cape route to Asia cut that prosperity, and the Ottoman conquest of 1517 reduced the city to a provincial capital.

Growth resumed in the 19th century. Muhammad Ali rebuilt the Citadel and its mosque; his grandson Ismail, preparing for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, laid out a new downtown of boulevards and squares on drained land beside the river. British occupation from 1882 lasted until after the Second World War, and the officers' coup of 1952 ended the monarchy. The city then expanded enormously, over the river and out into the desert. Tahrir Square was the focus of the protests of 2011 and the mass demonstrations of 2013, and the seat of government has since moved east into the desert, to the New Capital inaugurated in 2024.

Cairenes call their city Masr, the same word they use for Egypt itself, and treat it as the capital of Arab culture. Its film studios and record labels supplied the Arab world for most of the 20th century, Umm Kulthum's monthly radio concerts once emptied the streets, and Naguib Mahfouz set the novels that won him the Nobel Prize in the alleys around Khan el-Khalili. The Cairene accent is the version of Arabic most easily understood from Morocco to Iraq, and the city's humour — quick, self-deprecating, fond of wordplay — is famous across the region.

Religion is woven into the day. Calls to prayer overlap across the rooftops, Friday midday empties the offices, and Ramadan turns the city inside out, with quiet afternoons and streets that stay busy until dawn. Al-Azhar remains a leading authority in Sunni Islam. The Coptic Orthodox minority worships in the ancient churches of Old Cairo and in cave churches cut into the Mokattam cliffs, and Christmas on 7 January and Easter are public occasions. Moulids, the birthday festivals of saints, bring Sufi chanting, drumming and fairground stalls to the squares around the great shrine mosques.

Older crafts survive in the old city: coppersmiths and lantern makers, inlaid woodwork, and the appliqué tentmakers who still work in a covered street near Bab Zuweila. Football splits the city between Al Ahly and Zamalek, whose derby is the biggest fixture in Egyptian sport. Manners matter more than speed: greetings are extended, invitations are repeated, and refusing hospitality outright is awkward.

About ten million people live in Cairo proper and more than 22 million in the Greater Cairo area, which spreads across the Cairo, Giza and Qalyubia governorates and is the largest urban area in Africa and the Arab world. The contrasts are sharp: the tree-lined streets of Zamalek and Maadi, the dense lanes of the old city, vast informal neighbourhoods of unfinished red-brick blocks built on former farmland, and gated compounds in the desert at New Cairo and Sheikh Zayed.

Government, services, trade, construction and tourism drive the economy, with factories in Shubra El Kheima and Helwan and a growing cluster of offices in the desert suburbs. Many households run on more than one job, and Egyptians working in the Gulf send money home. Rising prices after successive devaluations of the pound, rents, and the demolition of old quarters for new flyovers are the constant subjects of complaint.

The day starts early and ends very late. Millions ride the metro and shared microbuses; traffic thickens from mid-morning until well after dark. Shops, cafés and juice bars stay open past midnight, especially in summer when the evening is the only comfortable part of the day, and families take their outings along the river, on the bridges and in the parks. Air pollution, water and power costs, and the long commute from the new suburbs are the issues people raise most.

Cairo eats standing up and late at night. Koshari, the bowl of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas and fried onions under a spiced tomato sauce with a garlic and vinegar dressing, is the city's cheap meal and Egypt's national dish, sold from shops that make nothing else. Breakfast is ful medames, fava beans stewed overnight with oil and cumin, and ta'meya, the Egyptian falafel made from crushed fava beans rather than chickpeas, both served in warm baladi bread from carts at dawn.

The city's own specialities are richer. Hawawshi is flatbread stuffed with spiced minced meat and baked until the crust crisps; mombar is sausage casing filled with seasoned rice and fried; fatta piles rice and fried bread under meat and a garlicky tomato broth, and is the dish of feast days. Grill houses around Al-Hussein serve kebab and kofta with salads and tahini, and hamam mahshi, pigeon stuffed with rice or freekeh, is a Cairo restaurant classic. Molokhia, a green soup of jute leaves, appears on most family tables.

Sweets and drinks are half the pleasure. Rice pudding and mahallabiya are sold in small bowls from dairy shops, feteer meshaltet comes flaky and layered with honey or cheese, and during Ramadan the pastry shops pile up kunafa and qatayef. Sugar cane juice is pressed on the street, karkadeh is drunk hot or cold, sahlab warms winter evenings, and tea, heavily sugared, is served in every coffee house along with thick coffee and shisha.