Mosque of Muhammad Ali

The Mosque of Muhammad Ali (also called the Alabaster Mosque) sits at the highest point of the Cairo Citadel and is one of the most visually distinctive landmarks of the Egyptian capital. The mosque was commissioned by Muhammad Ali Pasha — the Ottoman-Albanian ruler who governed Egypt from 1805 and is regarded as the founder of modern Egypt — and was built between 1830 and 1848 as both a working congregational mosque and the burial place of his eldest son Tusun, with Muhammad Ali himself eventually interred there as well. The mosque was constructed in the Ottoman imperial style modelled on the great mosques of Istanbul (most directly the Yeni Camii) rather than the local Mamluk tradition, with a large central dome flanked by four cascading half-domes, supported by four piers and surrounded by smaller domes on the exterior. The two slender pencil-thin minarets at the western corners are characteristic of Ottoman rather than Egyptian design and rise approximately eighty-two metres above the citadel — making them visible from across most of historic Cairo. The lower walls of the interior are clad in the alabaster (Egyptian onyx-marble) that gives the mosque its alternative name. From the citadel terrace beside the mosque, visitors can see across the entire historic centre of Cairo to the Pyramids of Giza on a clear day, and the building has become one of the most photographed sites in the country.