Bab Zuweila

Two massive rounded towers of dressed stone, crowned by a pair of slender minarets, make Bab Zuwayla one of the most striking silhouettes of medieval Cairo. It is one of only three gates surviving from the city walls of the Fatimid capital, and the last of them on the south side; from its upper platform the view runs over the domes and rooftops of the historic city, which as a whole is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The present gate was built in 1092 by the Fatimid vizier Badr al-Jamali, who rebuilt the city's mudbrick walls in stone. The name comes from the Zuwayla, a Berber tribe from the Fezzan whose soldiers were quartered here when the Fatimids founded Cairo in 969. Al-Jamali's gates show influences from Byzantine and northern Syrian military architecture; the medieval historian al-Maqrizi wrote that the three surviving gates were designed by three Christian monks from Edessa. Blind multilobed arches carved on the inner faces of the towers recall the western Islamic world from which the Fatimids came, and a Kufic inscription above the archway preserves the Shi'i profession of faith typical of the period. The wooden door leaves each weigh around three and a half tonnes. In the early 15th century the Mamluk sultan al-Mu'ayyad Shaykh, who had once been held in a prison next to the gate, replaced it with his great mosque and set its two minarets on the gate's bastions; inscriptions date them to 1419 and 1420 and name the master builder Muhammad ibn al-Qazzaz.

The gate was a stage for the city's public life. Mamluk sultans watched the departure of the mahmal, the ceremonial litter of the pilgrimage to Mecca, from its platform, and drummers played there when great commanders entered the city. It was also a place of execution: in 1260 the Mamluk ruler Qutuz displayed the heads of envoys sent by the Mongol leader Hulagu here before defeating the Mongols at Ain Jalut, and in 1517 the last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay II, was hanged at the gate after the Ottoman conquest. Popular devotion later attached it to a saint called Mitwali, and people hung locks of hair or scraps of cloth on the doors when asking for healing. The American Research Center in Egypt restored the gate between 1999 and 2003, excavating its base, which had been buried as the street level rose nearly two metres.

Getting there

Bab Zuwayla stands at the southern end of al-Mu'izz Street in Islamic Cairo, facing the Mosque of al-Mu'ayyad and the covered Street of the Tentmakers (al-Khayamiya) to the south, about 2 km from central Cairo. Cairo International Airport (CAI) is about 15 km away.