Category: Protest, from Wikidata’s classes “riot”, “protest”
Cairo fire
Wikidata classes on our event-class list: riot, protest (all its classes: Wikidata item)
The Cairo Fire (Arabic: حريق القاهرة), also known as Black Saturday, was a series of riots that took place on 26 January 1952, marked by the burning and looting of some 750 buildings—retail shops, cafes, cinemas, hotels, restaurants, theatres, nightclubs, and the city's Casino Opera —in downtown Cairo. The direct trigger of the riots was the Battle of Ismailia, an attack on an Egyptian police installation in Ismaïlia by British forces on 25 January, in which roughly 50 auxiliary policemen were killed.
The spontaneous anti-British protests that followed these deaths were quickly seized upon by organized elements in the crowd, who burned and ransacked large sectors of Cairo amidst the unexplained absence of security forces. The fire is thought by some to have signalled the end of the Kingdom of Egypt. The perpetrators of the Cairo Fire remain unknown to this day, and the truth about this important event in modern Egyptian history has yet to be established.
The disorder that befell Cairo during the 1952 fire has been compared to the chaos that followed the anti-government protests of 25 January 2011, which saw demonstrations take place amidst massive arson and looting, an inexplicable withdrawal of the police, and organized prison-breaking.
Text retrieved 2026-10-06 from Wikipedia.
Cite this
The link is the Wikipedia revision of September 29, 2026 (revision 1377459324), whose lead is exactly the text shown here.
APA 7
Cairo fire. (2026, September 29). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cairo_fire&oldid=1377459324
MLA 9
“Cairo fire.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Sept. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cairo_fire&oldid=1377459324.
Chicago (note)
Wikipedia, “Cairo fire,” last modified September 29, 2026, 14:06 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cairo_fire&oldid=1377459324.
Chicago (shortened note)
Wikipedia, “Cairo fire.”
Chicago cites well-known reference works such as Wikipedia in notes only, not in the bibliography.
This event on Middle East, 1900–present: https://middleeast.events/event/cairo-fire
If you use the map’s borders: CShapes 2.0 - historical country borders. Schvitz, G., et al. (2022). CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. https://icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes/ (modified by middleeast.events); West Bank Areas A/B/C: UN OCHA / HDX "Oslo Agreement" Areas A/B/C (West Bank). Distributed under the legacy HumanitarianResponse.info terms: non-commercial use with credit to UN OCHA. https://data.humdata.org/dataset/state-of-palestine-other-0-0-0-0-0; some corrected border points: GeoNames - CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). https://www.geonames.org/
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by Wikipedia contributors, from the article Cairo fire. Classes are Wikidata’s labels (CC0).