This chapter begins with the arrival of Ibadi student Saʿīd al-Bārūnī in Cairo in 1798, just before the invasion of the French army under Napoleon. It follows the life of Saʿīd in Cairo during the tumultuous decades of the early nineteenth century, including the departure of the French and the rise to power of the Ottoman governor Muḥammad ʿAlī. Following his return to the Maghrib, the chapter continues the story of the Agency by turning to a private letter written to Saʿīd by one of his students, Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, who was studying at the Agency in the 1850s. The books and letters connected to the Agency in this period reveal much about the world of Cairene Ibadis in the mid-nineteenth century, including the state of education at al-Azhar, the changing demographics of the Ibadi community, and signs of a growing relationship between the Ibadi community of the Indian Ocean and that of northern Africa.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.