During medieval times, the Fatimids managed to create an empire that controlled a large area of North Africa, from the Indus River in the East to the Atlantic Ocean in the West. In 969, on the Fatimid Caliphate’s fourth campaign on Egypt, the Fatimid general Jawhar the Sicilian finally succeeded in overthrowing the Abbasid Caliphate and conquering Egypt during the reign of the Fourth Fatimid Caliph: Al Muizz La din Allah.

When Al Muizz arrived in Egypt four years later, he decided that this area will be his empire’s new capital and named it al-Qāhirah, or “the Conqueror”. Over the following years, Al-Qahirah would become the political, cultural, and religious center of their empire that developed a new, indigenous Arabic culture and Egypt would witness two centuries of wealth and prosperity under the Fatimid rule.

Al Muizz’s palace would become Cairo’s first-ever building, and Al Muizz’s street would become the beating heart of the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt for centuries, with each Caliphate adding and expanding onto the street, leaving their own unique artistic mark. Over the centuries, the street grew from being a gated fortress where Egypt’s elites live, and you couldn’t access it except in the morning without a special permit, to this open-air museum that showcases a thousand years of history. It is the largest exhibition of Islamic architecture throughout the ages, from the Fatimid Cairo, to the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, all the way to the Ottomans and modern Egypt