1434 by Gavin Menzies Read Free Book Online

divided by race and religion. Surrounding them was a defensive wall (in Cairo it was Saladin’s) to keep out Mongols and robbers.
    At the center of medieval Cairo was the city’s Friday mosque, Al-Azhar, founded in 970, as soon as the enclosure walls of Al-Qahira were completed. It is perhaps the most prestigious mosque in the world and is connected to the world’s oldest university. For more than a thousand years Al-Azhar University has provided Muslim students from around the world with free board and a theological educationfocused on the Koran and Islamic law, logic, grammar, rhetoric, astronomy, and science.
    For centuries, the mosque on Fridays has been packed. As it overflows, men lay their mats outside on the pavement. They pray in uniform lines, rich and poor side by side, old men and young, golden cloaks next to dirty kashmaks. All men are equal in Islam; no boxes are reserved for the gentry. Inside, Al-Azhar resembles London’s Southwark Cathedral, though it is not quite as tall and rather more austere. Gowned students, seated between gray marble columns, are taught by a wizened imam perched in a high chair. (The gowns of Oxford and Cambridge were copied from those worn by Islamic students, just as our university “chair” is derived from the imam’s perch.)
    The Al-Azhar competes with the mosques of Sayyid Hasan, al-Ghoury, and Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay—all within a stone’s throw. The Egyptian president worships at the Mosque of Al-Azhar. Their muezzins call the faithful to prayer five times a day. Traditionally, muezzins are chosen from the blind, who cannot see down into the houses where unveiled women are dressing.
    In the square, Cairo’s festivals, the moulids, are held and the Sufi brotherhood prays with banners and drums; music blasts all night long. Vast crowds come up from the delta for the holiday of Eid, congregating at the cafés around the square, each one favored by a particular delta village.
    One can readily understand why Cairo would have been a magnet for all peoples of Islam, including Zheng He and his fellow Muslims returning from Mecca. In broad terms, foreigners lived in Cairo, white native Egyptians, the fellahin, lived on the delta and in the Nile Valley. With the holiest mosque in the world situated next to the largest market in the world, the city had everything. Here they could study the Koran, sell their goods, and enjoy the city’s storied evening delights.
    Today, as in the Middle Ages, Cairo is a city of good-natured people living in close quarters, bustling and jostling from one corner to the next. To motorists and pedestrians making headway through the crowds, a few hundred yards can seem like a mile. Cairo’s population is polyglot, full of the offspring of Sudanese, Armenian,Jewish, Georgian, Persian, North African, and Indian merchants. Indeed, Egyptians intermarried with the descendants of conquerors and merchants to such an extent that today it is difficult to find a “pure” Egyptian.
    Zheng He’s sailors would have seen, alongside Al-Azhar Mosque, two imposing complexes: the madrassah and the Wikala of al-Ghouri, named after one of the later Mamluk sultans. Wikala is the Egyptian name for a caravanserai. Both caravanserai and madrassah complemented the mosque and were frequently funded by a charity, or wakf, set up by the sultan or a wealthy merchant.
    Cairo’s madrassah, typical of an early Islamic university, is a large, rectangular building with an open courtyard at its center, surrounded by broad cloisters. In the cloisters, small groups of students debate with teachers; great importance is placed on mental agility. While Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages, Cairo safeguarded the world’s largest library. Here, the great books of the ancients, including Aristotle and Plato, were stored before at last being summoned to aid the Enlightenment.
    In the caravanserai of al-Ghoury, merchants from China laden