Arab and Ottoman Conquest

The Byzantines were able to regain control of the country after a brief Persian invasion early in the 7th century, until in AD 639, Egypt was absorbed into the Islamic Empire by the Muslim Arabs. When they defeated the Byzantine Armies in Egypt, with the help of some revolutionary Egyptians, the Arabs brought Sunni Islam to the country. Early in this period, Egyptians began to blend their new faith with indigenous beliefs and practices that had survived through Coptic Christianity that was expanded in Egypt by the Byzantines, leading to various Sufi orders that have flourished to this day.[15]

Muslim rulers nominated by the Islamic Caliphate remained in control of Egypt for the next six centuries, with Cairo as the seat of the Caliphate under the Fatimids. With the end of the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty, the Mamluks, a Turco-Circassian military caste, took control about AD 1250. By late 13th century, Egypt linked the Red Sea, India, Malaya, and East Indies.[16] The strategic positioning "assured importance in productive economy".[16] They continued to govern the country until the conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks in 1517, after which it became a province of the Ottoman Empire. The mid-14th-Century Black Death killed about 40% of the country's population.[17]

After the 15th century, the threat of military European Crusaders and Central Asian Mongols set the Egyptian system into decline.[16] The defensive militarization challenged the civil society and economic institutions.[16] The weakening of the economic system combined with the effects of Black Death left Egypt vulnerable to foreign invasion which can be seen with the Portuguese taking over their trade.[18] Egypt suffered six famines between 1687 and 1731.[19] The famine that afflicted Egypt in 1784 cost it roughly one-sixth of its population

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