Grand Mosques of Cairo

The Sulayman Pasha Mosque sits inside the Citadel of Cairo, marked by a collection of slender, pencil-thin minarets that taper sharply toward their pointed tops. Built in fifteen twenty-eight, this was the first mosque constructed in Egypt…

The Mosque of Muhammad Ali dominates the Cairo skyline with its two towering, pencil-thin minarets and a central dome that sits nearly one hundred seventy feet above the city. Muhammad Ali Pasha, the ruler who modernized nineteenth-century…

The Al-Rifa'i Mosque wears a limestone facade carved with intricate geometric patterns that mimic the Mamluk style of the fourteenth century, though the building dates only to the early twentieth. Khushyar Hanim, the mother of Khedive…

The Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hassan dominates the square with walls that rise over one hundred feet, topped by a heavy, protruding cornice of stone stalactites. Sultan Hassan commissioned this complex in thirteen fifty-six, intending it as…

The Mosque of Qanibay al-Rammah sits on a high rocky spur, marked by a slender, intricately carved minaret that rises above a distinctive, ribbed stone dome. Built in the early sixteenth century for a Mamluk official, the structure…

The Mosque of Taghri Bardi features a limestone facade with a prominent, intricately carved stone portal that sets it apart from the surrounding streetscape. Built in fourteen-forty, it serves as a funerary complex for Taghri Bardi, a…

The Madrasa of Sarghatmish features a slender, highly decorative minaret that spirals upward, distinct from the blocky shapes surrounding it in the Al-Kabsh neighborhood. Built in thirteen fifty-six by a powerful Mamluk emir, the complex…

The Mosque of Ibn Tulun features a pointed brick minaret with a spiraling outer staircase that sets it apart from the surrounding skyline. Built in the late ninth century by Ahmad ibn Tulun, a governor of Egypt who broke away from the…

The Gayer-Anderson Museum consists of two seventeenth-century Ottoman houses fused together, identifiable by their mashrabiya windows that jut out like wooden lace over the street. Major John Gayer-Anderson, a British army doctor and…