Mosque of Muhammad Ali

The Mosque of Muhammad Ali stands at the highest point of the Citadel of Saladin in Cairo, and its domes and slender minarets are visible across much of the city. It lies within Historic Cairo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Muhammad Ali Pasha, who ruled Egypt from 1805 and founded the dynasty that held power until 1952, ordered the mosque in memory of his son Tusun Pasha. Work began in 1830 to designs by the architect Yusuf Bushnak, and the main structure was completed around 1848, with the decoration finished under his successors. Muhammad Ali died in 1849, and in 1857 his body was moved from the family burial ground at Hosh al-Basha to a marble tomb inside the mosque.

The mosque follows the Ottoman imperial style of Istanbul and breaks with the Mamluk tradition of Cairo. A large central dome is surrounded by four half domes and smaller domes, and two pencil-shaped minarets rise more than 80 metres. The lower walls and courtyard are faced with alabaster, which gives the mosque its popular name. Inside, the prayer hall is lit by hundreds of small lamps hanging from a great chandelier.

In the courtyard stands an ornate ablution fountain and a cast iron clock tower given by King Louis-Philippe of France in the mid-1840s, in return for the obelisk that now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. From the terraces beside the mosque there are wide views over Cairo.

The mosque is visited with a Citadel ticket. Shoes are removed, and modest dress is required.

The site needed heavy groundwork before building. Earlier Mamluk palaces on the summit of the Citadel were demolished, and rubble was filled in to make a level platform for the new mosque. The decoration dragged on for years after the walls were up and was finished in 1857 under Said Pasha, the date usually given for the completion of the whole building.

The size comes from its single central dome, 21 metres across and 52 metres high at the apex. Standing in the middle of the prayer hall gives the clearest sense of how the four half domes spread the load outward.

The courtyard is almost as large as the prayer hall and is surrounded by arcades with small domes. The French clock in its tower was out of order for many years; King Farouk had it repaired, and a further restoration of the clock tower began in 2014.

Plan time for the rest of the Citadel, where the fourteenth-century Al-Nasir Muhammad Mosque is a short walk away.