Mosque of Muhammad Ali

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 Egypt, built this structure as a burial place for himself. He imported massive slabs of Egyptian alabaster to cover the lower exterior walls, a design choice that earned the building its common name, the Alabaster Mosque. His tomb remains inside near the entrance.