Bab al-Futuh, Cairo

Bab al-Futuh is one of the two northern gates of Cairo, part of Badr al-Jamali's rebuilding of the walls in 1087-1092; the account al-Maqrizi gives attributes it, with Bab al-Nasr and Bab Zuwayla, to three Armenians from Edessa. ¹ Its name, like Bab Zuwayla's, was carried over from the gates of al-Mansuriyya, the Fatimid city in Tunisia. ³

Like Bab al-Nasr it is solid masonry two-thirds of the way up, flanked by massive two-storey towers with bulging semicircular fronts; the lower storey is indented with round-arched recessed panels on the front and sides. ² The inner arches flanking the gate carry cushion voussoirs, a feature more common in later Islamic and Crusader building, seen in the portal of al-Zahir Baybars's mosque and the façade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. ² The upper storey of each tower has recessed rectangular panels with arrow slits in round-arched frames, linked by a moulding of lines and loops, and the towers are crested with round-headed crenellation. ²

Inside, the arrangement is the reverse of Bab al-Nasr: a short barrel vault joins the entrance to an inner bay roofed by a dome on pendentives, and the long upper chambers have cross-vaults crowned by medallions. ²

Bab al-Nasr and Bab al-Futuh with their connecting walls, and the Mosque of al-Hakim with its huge battered corner tower carrying its minaret, form what Yeomans calls a breathtaking massing of cubic, semicircular and cylindrical forms, a simple combination repeated along Salah al-Din's walls to the west. ²