Saladin paces the corridors, bracing his unwavering, intense devotion on the back of an army as he lines blueprints for a citadel. Centuries later, Muhammed Ali dines in a great hall—flanked by men and a conduit of ill-will. He will pinch a grape between two fingers and hail the end of the Mamluks; they will not leave his citadel standing. A carved, double-headed vulture, sits on the Western wall as an unspeaking witness to a massacre. Today, the athan (call to prayer) rumbles through Cairo’s highlands and the iftar cannon fires on sultry Ramadan evenings. At the heart of it all is a single structure: the Cairo Citadel. First dubbed Qal’at al-Jabal, or Citadel of the Mountain, it is the only urban citadel in Egypt and the final addition to a series of structures across Anatolia, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula. It is considered the most monumental, as the first seat of the Ayyubid dynasty and the Mamluk sultanate. First conceptualized by Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi in 1176 AD, it was designed to be the “stronghold in a grand and ambitious defensive project” that would encircle Cairo and the then Fatimid…
