The oldest mosque in Cairo surviving in its original form, from 879, with a spiral minaret and almost nobody in it.
Ahmad ibn Tulun was sent from Samarra to govern Egypt for the Abbasids in 868, and promptly stopped sending the tax revenue. He built himself a new capital called al-Qata’i north of Fustat, and at its centre this mosque, finished in 879.
The capital is gone. The mosque is the only thing left of it, and it is the oldest mosque in Cairo surviving substantially in its original form.
Why it looks different
It is built of fired brick faced in stucco, not stone, and it is enormous — the courtyard alone is over six thousand square metres, and the whole enclosure is the largest mosque in Cairo by area.
The plan is Samarran rather than Egyptian: a vast open sahn with a domed ablution fountain, surrounded by arcades on pointed arches, and the whole thing enclosed by an outer wall creating a buffer of empty ground.
The minaret has an external helical staircase, spiralling up the outside of a square tower, which is unlike anything else in Egypt and directly copied from the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq. The story that Ibn Tulun designed it by absent-mindedly winding a strip of parchment round his finger is charming and unverifiable.
The carved stucco decoration around the windows and arches — over a hundred windows, no two grilles alike — is the finest of its date anywhere.
What it feels like
Empty. That is the point. Cairo’s other great monuments have crowds; this one, for reasons that are hard to explain, mostly does not. Standing in the middle of that courtyard with the sound of the city held off by the outer wall is one of the genuinely calming experiences available in a very loud place.
It has been used as a shelter for pilgrims, a wool store and a hospital over the centuries, which is partly why it survived.
The Gayer-Anderson Museum
Attached to the outer wall are two sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses joined together, occupied from 1935 by Major Robert Gayer-Anderson, a British army doctor and collector, and left to Egypt with their contents.
They are the best-preserved domestic interiors in Cairo — mashrabiya screens, a reception hall with a fountain, a Damascus room, a Persian room, a roof terrace — and the museum is a genuine highlight rather than an add-on. Part of The Spy Who Loved Me was filmed on the roof.
Ticketed separately and inexpensive.
Practicalities
Entry to the mosque is free or by small donation; shoes come off or covers are provided. Modest dress, headscarf for women.
Expect to tip the man who minds the shoes and the man who opens the minaret. This is normal and the amounts are small.
More Landmarks
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The Citadel of Saladin
Eight hundred years of fortification on a spur above the city, crowned by an Ottoman mosque that looks like it wandered in from Istanbul.
Al-Azhar Mosque
Founded in 970, and the oldest continuously operating university in the world by most reckonings.