Mosque of Muhammad Ali, Cairo Citadel

The mosque of Muhammad Ali (1830-1848) dominates the Citadel and much of the city; Muhammad Ali built it in his rebuilding of the Citadel as the seat of government, for which notable medieval buildings, among them the Ablaq Palace and the Hall of Justice, were demolished. ^{3 2}

Its broad shape and composition are Ottoman, after the Yeni Cami in Istanbul (1663): a central dome with four half-domes; its decoration is European baroque. ^{1 2} The architect first chosen was the Frenchman Pascal Coste; the final choice fell on an Armenian. ¹ In the courtyard stands a clock-tower (1845), a gift of King Louis Philippe of France, in return for which Muhammad Ali gave the obelisk now in the Place de la Concorde; below it is an octagonal alabaster fountain, and the alabaster facing the arcades and first storey, which gives it its popular name, the "Alabaster Mosque", came from Upper Egypt. ^{1 2}

Yeomans holds that the mosque is not Egyptian but an imported European-Ottoman synthesis, and that its interior is profane in taste and unrelated to Islamic tradition; he quotes Flaubert (1849) on the "deplorable taste" of the family tombs, Florence Nightingale calling it "tawdrily ornamented", and Robert Curzon lamenting the demolition of the granite-columned Hall of Justice to make way for it. ^{1 2} He ends his book by noting that Western tourists often see nothing of Cairo's Islamic heritage but this mosque, one of his reasons for writing; these are his views and those of the writers he cites. ²