Bab al-Nasr, Cairo

Bab al-Nasr is one of the two northern gates of Fatimid Cairo, built when Badr al-Jamali, vizier to the caliph al-Mustansir, rebuilt the city walls in brick and stone between 1087 and 1092 after the first mud-brick wall had crumbled. ¹ Yeomans reports al-Maqrizi's statement that Bab al-Nasr, Bab al-Futuh and Bab Zuwayla were built by three Armenian Christians from Edessa, which he finds plausible since many Armenians settled in Cairo after the Seljuk conquest of their region and Badr was himself Armenian; it would explain some of their Byzantine features. ¹

Two sturdy three-tiered rectangular towers flank the gate, divided two-thirds of the way up by a strong band of corbelled moulding; the first two tiers are solid dressed stone around a rubble core, the base braced with horizontally inserted columns. ² The third-storey chambers are domed on pendentives, and the towers once had round-headed crenellation, shown in an engraving of the Description de l'Égypte (1812); it is now bricked in, and most arrow slits have been widened for guns, alterations Creswell attributed to Napoleon's troops who occupied the towers in 1798-1801. ²

The semicircular entrance, beneath a Kufic inscription of the Shi'i form of the profession of faith, leads into a spacious bay flanked by recesses and roofed with a cross-vault crowned by a rosette. ² The tower fronts carry a Kufic band under the corbelling and round and pointed shields in the Byzantine and Norman fashion, which Behrens-Abouseif reads as the city's shields with a protective role; Yeomans compares them with the Byzantine icons once set over city gates. ^{2 3}

Some two hundred metres of wall run between Bab al-Nasr and Bab al-Futuh, taking in the north wall of the Mosque of al-Hakim; Yeomans counts these walls and gates the finest surviving pre-Crusader military architecture in the Middle East. ² Behrens-Abouseif notes an attempt under al-Amir (1101-1131) to build an observatory on Bab al-Nasr, never completed. ⁴