Cairo, the capital of learning (1260-1517)

Part oneThe city of the sultans

After 1258 Cairo was the strongest Muslim city still standing between the Mongols and the Mediterranean. The Mamluk sultans ruled Egypt, Syria and the Hijaz from its Citadel, the fortress on the hill that Salahuddin had begun. They protected Makkah and Madinah and sent the covering for the Ka'bah each year. They also kept an Abbasid caliph in the city from the time of Baibars. The caliph held no real power, but his presence gave the sultans standing across the Muslim world.

Scholars who fled the Mongols from Iraq and Iran found homes and work in Cairo and Damascus. The sultans and their officers spent large sums on endowments, waqfs, that paid for madrasas, mosques, Sufi lodges, hospitals and public fountains. Many of these buildings still stand in the streets of old Cairo. Sultan Qalawun, who ruled from 1279 to 1290, built a great complex with a hospital, a school and his own tomb, which treated patients without charge. His son al-Nasir Muhammad ruled, with breaks, from 1293 to 1341, one of the longest reigns of the age, and the city grew under him with new mosques, markets and canals. Al-Azhar, founded under the Fatimids, became a leading Sunni centre of learning.

The Moroccan scholar Ibn Khaldun, who settled in Cairo in 1382 and taught and served there as a judge, described it as the metropolis of the world. Learning moved between Cairo and Damascus constantly. Damascus in these years was home to Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Kathir and many other scholars, and Cairo produced historians and hadith scholars whose books are still read.

Part twoPlague, Circassians and Timur

The age had hard years too. In the middle of the fourteenth century the Black Death reached the Muslim lands and killed between a third and a half of the people in many cities. Egypt lost workers, soldiers and scholars, and recovery was slow.

In 1382 power passed from the Bahri line of Qalawun's family to the Burji Mamluks, who were mostly Circassians from the Caucasus. The first of them, Sultan Barquq, died in 1399 and left the throne to his son al-Nasir Faraj, a boy of no more than sixteen. The next year Timur, the conqueror from Central Asia, came west. The Mamluks had sheltered his enemy, the former ruler of Baghdad, and had killed his envoys. In 1400 and 1401 Timur swept through Syria and sacked Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus.

Faraj brought an army to Damascus, but when the two armies faced each other he turned back to Cairo, afraid of a revolt at home, and left the city to its fate. Ibn Khaldun had come with the Mamluk party. He was sent to talk with Timur and spent seven weeks in his camp, and Timur, impressed by him, let him leave alive. Damascus was then sacked and burned, and the Umayyad Mosque was badly damaged. Egypt itself was spared. Timur turned north to fight the Ottomans and never came back.

Part threeThe Ottomans arrive

The Burji sultans ruled for another century. They built fine mosques and schools, and some of them were able rulers, but money grew short and the sultans changed often. A new power was rising to the north. The Ottomans had taken Constantinople in 1453 and now ruled Anatolia and the Balkans.

In 1516 the Ottoman sultan Selim I marched into Syria. At Marj Dabiq, north of Aleppo, his army, with its cannon and musketeers, defeated the Mamluk sultan al-Ghawri, who died on the field. In January 1517 the Ottomans beat the last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, outside Cairo and entered the city. Tumanbay was captured and put to death. The Abbasid caliph in Cairo, al-Mutawakkil III, was taken to Istanbul. Egypt, Syria and the Hijaz, with the care of the holy cities, passed to the Ottomans.

The Mamluk sultanate ended after 267 years. Its soldiers had halted the Mongols at Ain Jalut and ended the crusader states, and its sultans had made Cairo a home for scholars when Baghdad lay in ruins. Many Mamluk families stayed on in Egypt and kept much of their power under Ottoman rule for almost three more centuries.

From the hadith

Narrated Abu Hurairah:

that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: "Whoever takes a path upon which to obtain knowledge, Allah makes the path to Paradise easy for him."

When Baghdad lay in ruins, Cairo kept the lamps of learning lit.

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• Alexandria
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• Marj Dabiq
• Makkah
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