Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim founds Dar al-Ilm in Cairo

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The eccentric Fatimid caliph established a House of Knowledge in Cairo, stocking it with thousands of volumes on astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and grammar, and providing ink, pens, and paper free to all scholars. Despite al-Hakim's erratic persecutions elsewhere, the Dar al-Ilm became one of the great libraries of the medieval Islamic world, rivaling Baghdad's faded memory.