Egypt and Syria

The Battle of Yarmouk in 636 opened Syria to the Muslim armies, and Damascus became the seat of the Umayyad caliphs, who ruled from it until 750. Egypt was at first a province of the caliphate, and it was there that al-Shafi'i spent his last years; in 969 the Fatimids conquered it, founded Cairo, and went on to carry their rule into Damascus and southern Syria.

From the twelfth century the two lands were drawn together by the wars with the Crusader states. Nur al-Din Zengi, who inherited Aleppo in 1146, took Damascus in 1154; Saladin, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, united Egypt and Syria and recaptured Jerusalem after the Battle of Hattin in 1187; and the Mamluk Sultanate that succeeded the Ayyubids in 1250 held Egypt and Syria from Cairo until the Ottoman conquest of 1516–1517, having turned back the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260. Among the scholars of those centuries were al-Nawawi, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and Ibn Kathir in Damascus, and Ibn Khaldun and al-Suyuti in Cairo.

The collection closes in the modern period, with Muhammad Ali Pasha, Wali of Egypt from 1805 to 1848; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who lived in Egypt from 1871 to 1879; Muhammad Abduh, Grand Mufti of Egypt; Rashid Rida, a scholar from Ottoman Syria who settled in Egypt and founded the journal al-Manar in 1898; and the Syrian Hanafi scholar Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda.