From the Arab conquest to the Arab Spring: in its capacity for architectural and social transformation and in its tension between religious tradition and modern glitter, Cairo is like no other city in the Islamic world.

In this book, Swiss architect Thomas Meyer-Wieser explores the idea of the North African city that was once the heart of ancient civilisation and is now the capital of modern Egypt. As well as looking at more than 300 buildings, he takes the reader on 20 walks and excursions.

• The Arab conquest: 7th to 10th centuries • Fatimid rule: 10th to 12th centuries • The Golden Age: 12th to 15th centuries • Ottoman provincial city: 16th to 18th centuries • ‘Paris on the Nile’: Cairo in the 19th century • The modern metropolis: 20th to 21st centuries

Thomas Meyer-Wieser is an architect and urban planner. He is a graduate of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and has had a keen interest in the architecture and town planning of the Islamic world since his university days. In 1979 he worked on a UNESCO project for the consolidation and restoration of the Sassanid Palace Ghala Dokhtar in Firuzabad, Iran. Between 1995 and 2002 he was a lecturer at the Landscape Architecture Division of the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil. Thomas Meyer-Wieser is the author of architectural guides to Cairo (German edition, 2014), Iran (2016), and Algiers (2022) published by DOM publishers.