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Cairo is one of ’s Biggest Cities.

Cairo was founded by the Fatimid caliphs as a royal enclosure. It replaced Fustat as the seat of the government. It later came under the Mamluks, was ruled by the Ottomans 1517 to 1798, and briefly occupied by Napoleon. Muhammad Ali of Egypt made Cairo the capital of his independent from 1805 to 1882, after which the British took control of it until Egypt attained independence in 1922.

Cairo has a of about 6.8 million people, according to the 2006 .[1] The number of inhabitants was about a million higher at the time of the , but this was adjusted downwards on the 17th of April 2008 when the new governorate of Helwan was created from parts of a.o. . Cairo’s metropolitan area has a of about 17.8 million people.[5] Cairo is the sixteenth most in the world. It is also the most in .[6]

Today, Greater Cairo homes various historic towns and modern districts. A journey through Cairo is virtual time travel: from the Pyramids, the Church, Saladin’s Citadel, the Virgin Mary’s Tree, the , and Heliopolis, to Al-Azhar, the of Amr ibn al-A’as, Saqqara, the , and the Old . It is the , and its history is intertwined with that of the country. Today, Cairo’s official name is Al-Qahira (Cairo), although the name informally used by most Egyptians is “Masr” ( Arabic name for Egypt), from the original name of Egypt’s first Arab capital Fustat, Misr al-Fustat, “ of the Tents”. It is also titled as “The of A Thousand Minarets”

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Egypt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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