Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Cities

Cairo

Also Known As al-Qahira (Arabic) The Arabic name of the Fatimid foundation, from which Cairo derives. · Cairene
Egypt

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Cairo was founded in 969 as the Fatimid capital, and the mosque and teaching institution of al-Azhar, begun at the same time, has become one of the most influential centers of Sunni learning and legal opinion anywhere. Older settlements the city absorbed carry their own histories: Coptic Cairo holds churches of the Egyptian Orthodox tradition and the Ben Ezra synagogue, whose storeroom yielded the Cairo Geniza, several hundred thousand medieval Jewish documents. The city remains the seat of both the Coptic Orthodox papacy and Egypt's Sunni religious establishment.

Facts
Attributions
Tradition
Islam, with al-Azhar founded in 970 and among the oldest continuously working centres of Sunni learning; Coptic Orthodox Christianity in Old Cairo; and a Jewish community whose Ben Ezra synagogue held the Cairo Geniza 2
Origins
Founded
Founded in 969 as al-Qahira by the Fatimids, beside the earlier settlements of Fustat and Babylon-in-Egypt 1
Traditions
Sacred and Liturgical Languages
Arabic for Islam and for most Coptic preaching, with Bohairic Coptic retained in the Coptic liturgy and Hebrew in the synagogues 3
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Al-Azhar, from Fatimid Foundation to Sunni Authority

The mosque of al-Azhar was built in the first years of the new Fatimid capital and completed in 972, and teaching began there within a few years. The irony of its later career is that the Fatimids were Ismaili Shia and founded it to propagate their own doctrine through trained missionaries. When Saladin ended Fatimid rule in 1171 that teaching was suppressed, and the institution was rebuilt over the following centuries as a centre of Sunni learning, eventually of all four Sunni schools of law, each with its own teaching circle and endowments.

Instruction was organised for most of its history around scholars rather than a syllabus. A student attached himself to a shaykh, worked through a text with him, and received a licence to transmit that text in turn. Residential lodgings were arranged by region of origin, which drew students from West Africa, the Nile valley, the Levant, Anatolia, the Indian Ocean and beyond, and made graduates a network as much as a class.

The modern institution is a state one. A law of 1961 added faculties of medicine, engineering and commerce, brought appointments under government control and made the Shaykh of al-Azhar an office of the state as well as of the scholars. Its Islamic Research Academy issues opinions that carry weight far outside Egypt, and its position on questions from bank interest to organ donation is reported worldwide. Al-Azhar's authority is real, contested and inseparable from the government that appoints its head, and any account of Sunni Islam today has to reckon with all three of those facts at once.

Coptic Cairo and the Geniza Storeroom

The oldest religious quarter of Cairo is not Fatimid at all. Around the Roman fortress of Babylon, south of the medieval city, stand churches that were old before the Arab conquest: the Hanging Church suspended over a gatehouse of the fortress, and Abu Serga, beneath which a crypt is venerated as a shelter of the holy family during the flight into Egypt. That tradition of the flight is the reason a series of Egyptian sites is a pilgrimage route for Copts, and it is one of the few strands of the gospel narrative that gives Egypt a place in it.

The Coptic Orthodox Church traces its see to Mark the Evangelist at Alexandria and now has its papal seat in Cairo. It is the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and its liturgy preserves the Coptic language in a country that has spoken Arabic for over a thousand years.

Inside the same quarter is the Ben Ezra synagogue, whose lumber room produced one of the great documentary finds of any tradition. Jewish practice forbids the destruction of writing that carries the divine name, so worn out books and papers were stored in a geniza. The Cairo geniza was never cleared, and by the nineteenth century held several hundred thousand fragments, dispersed to European and American libraries in the 1890s, most of them to Cambridge through Solomon Schechter. They include lost Hebrew works, early copies of rabbinic texts, and above all the ordinary paperwork of medieval life, letters, accounts, marriage contracts and shopping lists, from which S. D. Goitein reconstructed a whole Mediterranean society.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Cairo directly: "entirely from the documents of the Cairo Geniza, the vast cache of discarded papers preserved in a Fustat synagogue."

This source names Cairo directly: "from the American University in Cairo Press, is written by the Czech Egyptologist who led decades of excavation at Abusir itself."

Source Abusir: Realm of OsirisMiroslav Verner

This source names Cairo directly: "1871, at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo."

Source Wikipedia, "Aida"
Al-Azhar, Sacred Sites

Al-Azhar was founded with the Fatimid city and became a center of Sunni learning.

This source names Cairo directly: "their capital from North Africa to Cairo."

Source Two Folios from the Blue Qur'an, AKM477 (Aga Khan Museum)Aga Khan Museum, catalogue entry

Caliph, Abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate 1924 (Wikipedia) names Cairo by its exact full name: cessful caliphate conferences followed (Cairo 1926, Jerusalem 1931, and one in 1924).

This source names Cairo directly: "reference encyclopedia article on the Cairo museum's holdings and history."

This source names Cairo directly: "siege, but a subsequent advance toward Cairo was trapped by the annual Nile flood at al-Mansurah in 1221 and forced to surrender."

Source God's War: A New History of the CrusadesChristopher Tyerman

This source names Cairo directly: "by the American University in Cairo Press, bringing together specialists on waqf, the Islamic charitable and religious endowment, across different regions and periods of Islamic history."

Source Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic WorldPascale Ghazaleh (ed.)

This source names Cairo directly: "francais d'archeologie orientale in Cairo in 1942, is the philological study that established the Jabirian corpus, the vast body of alchemical and scientific texts attributed to the eighth century..."

This source names Cairo directly: "of Thelema, received by him at Cairo in 1904 and stating the tradition's central formula, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, along with the word of the aeon, Abrahadabra."

Source Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law)Aleister Crowley

This source names Cairo directly: "work from Cordoba through Fez and Cairo."

Source Maimonides: Life and ThoughtMoshe Halbertal

This source names Cairo directly: "photographed at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, independently confirming the Fourth Dynasty greywacke statue group and naming its three figures as Menkaure, Hathor and the goddess of the Sistrum nome..."

This source names Cairo directly: "2523 BCE, held by the Egyptian Museum, Cairo under accession JE 46499."

This source names Cairo directly: "held by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and a fourth by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston."

This source names Cairo directly: "the fortress of Babylon, near modern Cairo, before capturing the great city of Alexandria in 641 following a negotiated surrender; a brief Byzantine attempt to retake Alexandria by sea in 645 to 646..."

This source names Cairo directly: "Morocco differs in detail from one in Cairo because of him."

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

This source names Cairo directly: "with women's mosque movements in Cairo, that argues feminist theory has too often assumed agency must mean resistance to religious norms, when the women Mahmood studied cultivated pious virtue and..."

This source names Cairo directly: "The Cairo Coptic Museum catalogs the primary copy directly: it occupies pages forty to sixty nine of Nag Hammadi Codex III, inventory number 4851, a fourth century Sahidic Coptic papyrus codex found..."

This source names Cairo directly: "twentieth century, comparable to the Cairo Genizah as a sealed repository whose contents survived precisely because they were hidden away rather than kept in ordinary use."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names Cairo directly: "the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo in 1988 and recorded in the source register under its English working title, The Temple of the Oracle at Siwa Oasis, is the scholarly archaeological..."

Source The Temple of the Oracle at Siwa OasisKlaus P. Kuhlmann

Contained In

Egypt, Countries
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005Entries: Azhar, al-; Coptic ChurchView the Source
3. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
John Bowker (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1997View the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza
S. D. Goitein, University of California Press, 1967View the Source
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