CAIRO

the capital of egypt, the largest city in the middle east and africa, and a major political, religious, and cultural hub for the arab, islamic, and african worlds.

A city with fertile hinterland and a crossroads location for river, sea, and land trade has flourished near the juncture of the Nile valley of Upper Egypt and the delta of Lower Egypt for five thousand years. In 640 c.e. the conquering Muslim Arabs founded al-Fustat (now Old Cairo to Westerners), which superseded the Babylon of the Romans and its predecessor across the river, the Memphis of the pharaohs. In 969 the invading Fatimids founded al-Qahira (the Victorious), and Cairo acquired its current name and resumed its ancient role as an imperial center. (In Arabic, Misr has long been used interchangeably for both Egypt and Cairo.) The Fatimids established the renowned mosque-university alAzhar, and Salah al-Din (Saladin) of the Ayyubid dynasty built the hilltop Citadel, which remained the seat of power until the mid-nineteenth century.

Its population weakened by epidemics and the ruling Mamluks' internecine warfare, Cairo fell to the Ottomans in 1517. By the seventeenth century the Cape of Good Hope route had deprived Cairo (reduced once more to the status of a provincial city) of much of its spice trade. Europeans no longer spoke with awe of the city Egyptians called the Mother of the World. In 1798 the cartographers of Napoléon Bonaparte's military expedition found a city of a quarter of a million people, half of the population of Cairo at its fourteenth-century peak. The narrow, irregular streets of the preindustrial city served pedestrians, riders, and pack animals well enough, and balconies provided welcome shade. Gates that closed at night and dead-end alleys marked off city quarters, which were defined mainly along religious, ethnic, and occupational lines. Waqf endowments supported mosques, schools, Sufi lodges, baths, fountains, and hospitals.

The military, economic, administrative, and educational reforms introduced during Muhammad Ali's reign (1805–1848) left few external marks on Cairo, and the city's population, checked by epidemics and competition from burgeoning Alexandria,

remained stagnant until the middle of the century. After 1850, however, the population grew because of lower mortality rates, an influx of people from the countryside, and the immigration of European and Levantine entrepreneurs. The Alexandria-Cairo Railroad and the Suez Canal, whose construction was completed respectively in 1855 and 1869, quickened the pace of life in Cairo. The city's share of Egypt's total population, which had dipped from 5.8 percent in 1800 to a low of 4.7 percent in 1865 (when Alexandria was in full bloom), rose to 6.9 percent in 1897. Today it accounts for over a quarter of the total population of Egypt.

Under Muhammad Ali's grandson Ismaʿil (r. 1863–1879) and the British occupation (1882–1922), the unused space between Cairo and its river ports Bulaq and Old Cairo was developed. Inspired by the municipal improvements effected in Paris by Baron Georges Haussmann and determined to impress the Europeans at the ceremonies celebrating the Suez Canal's completion, Ismaʿil instructed engineer Ali Mubarak to equip the suburb Ismaʿiliyya with Parisian-style boulevards, traffic hubs, gardens, palaces, and even an opera house. Ismaʿil had two boulevards for vehicle traffic cut through the old city before the bankruptcy of Egypt intervened and cost him the throne. European connoisseurs of "Oriental Cairo" persuaded his successor to found the Comité de Preservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe (1881), and preservationists still fight to save some monuments and neighborhoods in Cairo from relentless overpopulation, decay, and demolition for urban renewal.

Under the British, Cairo's European population (30,000, or 6 percent of the city's population in 1897) dominated big business and filled the fashionable new quarters of Heliopolis, Garden City, Maʿadi, and Zamalek with their Mediterranean-style villas. European concessionaires developed the

water, gas, electricity, telephone, and tramway services, and built the bridges across the Nile. Bridges made accessible the first artery to the West Bank in 1872. By 1914 the access provided by additional bridges to more arteries to the West Bank and to the islands of Rawda and Gazira resulted in rapid development. Between 1896 and 1914 electric tramways (soon replaced by motor vehicles) revolutionized transportation within the city and made possible the swift development of suburbs to the northeast (Abbasiyya, Heliopolis), the north (Shubra), and the west (Rawda, Zamalik, Giza).

Between 1922 and 1952 the domination by Europeans of economic and political life in Egypt ebbed. In 1949 the closing of the Mixed Courts put an end to special privileges for Westerners, and Cairo belatedly acquired a municipal government that was distinct from the national ministries. Life in the old city deteriorated (see the masterful portrayal of this time by novelist Najib Mahfuz). Well-to-do Egyptians left for the suburbs, Egyptians from rural parts of the country crowded in, and the overflow of tens of thousands of inhabitants spilled over into the cemeteries of the City of the Dead.

Under Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1952–1970) there was an acceleration of both planned and unplanned urban development. Private utility and transport concessions reverted to the state, waqf reform freed land for development, a new airport opened, and a revamped road network briefly alleviated some of the traffic congestion. The Corniche exposed Cairo to the river, and Maydan al-Tahrir became the city center. The Nile Hilton and the new Shepheard's were the first of many luxury hotels built to cater to the expanding tourist trade. Heavy industry was set up in suburban Hilwan and Shubra al-Khayma. The 1956 Master Plan for Cairo recommended that the city limit its population to 3.5 million (a maximum that had already been exceeded) and advocated planned satellite communities and development on desert rather than on agricultural land. The resulting Nasr City—with government offices, housing blocks, schools, a 100,000-seat stadium, and a new campus for al-Azhar—was a success, but Muqattam City, perched high on the desert cliffs, was not.

Since 1970 the Hilwan–al-Marj metro line has been opened in Cairo, sewer and telephone systems have been upgraded, and more satellite cities have been built in the desert (Sadat City, 10th Ramadan, 6th October, al-Ubur, 15th May). The population crush nevertheless threatens to dwarf such efforts. The runaway sprawl into agricultural lands in the delta and Giza continues while the problem-plagued desert satellite cities sit half empty and a purple cloud of polluted air regularly hangs over Cairo. Opportunities for jobs, schooling, housing, and healthcare are better in Cairo than in the teeming countryside, and people from rural areas keep pouring in. Shanty towns proliferate. One out of every four Egyptians lives in this Third-World megalopolis of seventeen million people.

Cairo remains the cultural capital of the Arab world. Its assets include al-Azhar and four modern universities, twenty-odd museums, a major movie industry and playhouses, a radio and television industry, bookshops and publishing houses, al-Ahram and other periodicals, a zoo, a new opera house, the headquarters of the Arab League, and the Academy of the Arabic Language.

see also azhar, al-; bonaparte, napolÉon; cairo university; egypt; mahfuz, najib; mamluks; mixed courts; muhammad ali; nasser, gamal abdel; suez canal; waqf.

Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, Janet. Cairo: 1,001 Years of the City Victorious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

André, Raymond. Cairo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Francy, Claire E. Cairo: The Practical Guide, 2003. Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2002.

Rodenbeck, Max. Cairo: The City Victorious. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Seton-Williams, Veronica; Stocks, Peter; and Seton-Williams, M. V. The Blue Guide Egypt, 3d edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Staffa, Susan Jane. Conquest and Fusion: The Social Evolution of Cairo, A.D. 642–1850. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1977.

Stewart, Desmond. Great Cairo: Mother of the World, 3d edition. Cairo: American University in Cairo, 1996.

Donald Malcolm Reid