Cyrus, Bishop of Alexandria and the last Byzantine ruler in Egypt, imposed strict conformity with the creed of the Byzantine Church and repressed the local Coptic religion. In 639 the Arab commander Amr Ibn Al-As invaded Egypt and within two years had conquered both Lower and Upper Egypt. He located his headquarters at Fustat, close to the original fort built by the Romans on the Nile. Amr Ibn Al-As was a benevolent and tolerant administrator, permitting the Coptic religion to prosper alongside the Islamic religion. By the early eighth century the dominant language had changed from Greek to Arabic, but conversion to Islam came more slowly. Egyptians embraced Islam in large numbers only after the successes of the political leaders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
For the first two centuries after the invasion, Arab military leaders were the appointed governors of Egypt. From the midninth century, however, the Baghdad caliphs appointed Turkish, Kurdish, or Circassian governors. By 969 c. E. the Egyptian governors had lost both power and popularity and succumbed to conquest by the Fatimid Dynasty of North Africa. The Fatimids founded the city of Cairo three miles north of Fustat and established Al-Azhar University and its mosque. Islamic civilization prospered under Fatimid leadership, but after two hundred years of rule the Fatimids weakened under the pressure of the invading Christian Crusaders from Europe.
A young Kurdish commander, Salah Al-Din, or Saladin, took control of the government in 1171, driving the Crusaders out of the Nile Delta. He built a citadel fortress between Fustat and Cairo as a symbol of his power and later defeated the Crusaders in Palestine and Syria.
From Saladin's death in 1193 to the Turkish Ottoman takeover in 1517, Egypt was ruled by a succession of Kurdish, Turkish, and Circassian Mamluk military governors. The Mamluks (a word
Meaning "owned") were originally slaves brought from Turkey to serve as mercenary soldiers, but over the years they were given their freedom. They took power from rulers who were weak and vulnerable. They also took power from each other without much concern for loss of life or good government.
The Ottomans captured Cairo in 1517 and governed Egypt as an administrative district of the Ottoman Empire. Cairo became a center of Islamic art and architecture during the next 250 years, and Al-Azhar University was the preeminent scholarly institution for Sunni Islam. By the late eighteenth century, however, the Ottoman sultans had become incompetent, and their empire was crumbling under the expansion of Western European trade and colonial conquests.
World History
