Source: OldRoads.org
Going over André Raymond’s book Cairo, I am reminded once again of the attraction of the Fatimids, the Shia dynasty that ruled Egypt from 969-1171 AD. It may have something to do with their library:
It contained eighteen thousand manuscripts on the sciences of antiquity alone. The books were arranged on shelves all around the rooms. The shelving was partitioned and enclosed behind shutters equipped with locks and bolts. In all there were more than one hundred thousand bound volumes. These included works on the laws of every religion, treatises on grammar and lexicography, collections of traditional lore, history books, royal biographies, essays on astronomy, works relating to the supernatural, alchemical research, all in various forms of writing. [Gaston Wiet by way of Raymond 47]
This is all made even more alluring by the Fatimid faith—an ancestor of today’s Ismailis—which in its esotericism and insistence on an interior meaning allowed for a highly creative interpretive lens. So it is not simply the presence of so many books, but the unloosed interpretive imagination that was at work in these stacks.
Ismailimail 
This is a brilliant article in which the author talks very creatively about recreating Fatimid Cairo in our imaginations by using as benchmarks, firstly, those parts of the old city that still exist today: the Al-Azhar mosque and the gates to the city, etc, and, secondly, using other types of resources available on the Internet like Travellers’ tales, architectural notes and contemporary images. All of this can be used to synthesise in our fertile imaginations a holistic and realistic picture of what this grand city must have looked like, a real shangrila up on a mountain as eyewitness Nasir-i Khusraw described it in his Travelogue or Safarnama.
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