Amr ibn al-As

c. 585 - 664 CE

A late Meccan convert to Islam who became one of the most gifted military commanders in Islamic history. Took Egypt from the Byzantines in the winter of 640-641 with an army of 4,000. Founded Fustat, the seed of modern Cairo. Governor of Egypt for over a decade.

Life

Amr ibn al-As of the Banu Sahm was a Meccan of the pre-Islamic aristocracy, a shrewd trader who had led caravans to Byzantine territory and to Ethiopia. He accepted Islam in 8 AH, only two years before the Prophet's death.

Under Umar ibn al-Khattab he was appointed commander of the campaign to take Egypt from the Byzantines. He crossed into Egypt in the winter of 639-640 CE with about 4,000 men. Within a year he had taken Pelusium, defeated a Byzantine relief force at Heliopolis, and besieged the great Byzantine fortress of Babylon of Egypt (near modern Cairo). Babylon fell in April 641. Alexandria, one of the great cities of the ancient world, home of the library, fell by treaty in 642.

Amr founded a garrison city at the foot of Babylon and named it Fustat, "the tent." That garrison city grew across centuries into medieval al-Qahira and then modern Cairo, one of the great cities of the Islamic world.

He served as governor of Egypt through most of the caliphates of Umar, Uthman, and Muawiya. He administered Egypt with a light and profitable hand. He is the Amr whom Umar humiliated in Medina, in the story of the Coptic boy at the horse race, in one of the founding cases of Islamic equal-justice-under-law.

Stories

Each story below is drawn from the classical Islamic historical sources.