0 galleries · 7 museums · 12 places
The medieval city — Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Cairo, its mosques, madrasas and gates still standing along streets that have carried traffic for a thousand years. At Bab al-Khalq, the Museum of Islamic Art holds over 100,000 objects spanning the seventh to the nineteenth century. Dense, loud, and layered in a way nothing else in the city is.
No published galleries in this district yet.
Al-Aqmar Mosque
Al-Azhar Mosque
Al-Azhar Park
Al-Rifa'i Mosque
Bab Zuwayla
Bab al-Futuh and Bab al-Nasr
Bayt al-Razzaz
Blue Mosque (Mosque of Aqsunqur)
Cairo Citadel (Citadel of Salah al-Din)
Cave Church (Monastery of St Simon the Tanner)
City of the Dead (Northern and Southern Cemeteries)
Funerary Complex of Sultan Qaytbay
The tower houses of Old Sana'a rise five to nine storeys of stone and mud — and the usual reasons, defence and lack of space, are both too small.
In one of the oldest cities on earth, families live stacked from the animals on the ground floor to the poetry room at the top, in mud towers nine storeys high. Why Sana'a built vertically has half a dozen answers, heat least of all — and the system that raised the towers is the same one now dissolving them.
A car bomb left one of the world's great collections of Islamic art in fragments on the floor. What the Museum of Islamic Art chose to do with the repair — mark it, rather than hide it — turns out to be the most quietly radical decision in the building.
Near the entrance of Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art stands an eight-hundred-year-old Syrian glass bottle with a small gold mark on its label. The mark does not mean the bottle is precious, though it is. It means it was broken — shattered on the floor by the 2014 bombing across the street, then patiently glued back into a single shape.
A courtyard plan far older than Islam turned North African houses — and the medinas built from them — to face inward. Climate and religion only half-explain why, and what finally displaced the courtyard says the rest.
The blank walls and inward courtyards of Fez, Tunis, Algiers and Cairo are usually explained by heat or religion. Both are true; neither is the whole story. The clue is in what eventually pushed the courtyard out of the modern city.
How a newly excavated workers' quarter reframes pharaonic history
A major survey travels to the West Coast, bringing ancient artefacts that shift focus from royal opulence to the daily lives of those who built the empire.
Wikidata knows Gladiator was filmed in Morocco. It doesn’t know where.
Ouarzazate is the second most filmed place in the Middle East and North Africa, yet 25 of its 27 productions are recorded only in Wikipedia prose. We compared filming records worldwide and found that in the Arab world, Wikidata usually knows the country but not the place.
The book that taught Europe to picture the East arrived with no pictures at all. Three centuries of illustrators — Dutch, Egyptian, Persian, French, German, Iraqi — each gave it a face, and every face was a self-portrait.
Open Galland's Thousand and One Nights, the edition that conquered Europe, and there is nothing to look at: no genie, no lamp, not one illustration. The most visually imagined book in the world began blind — and because its text was never fixed either, no picture of it could ever be a copy.
