A Mamluk mosque and law school of such scale that its own architect is said to have been executed so he could not repeat it.
Built between 1356 and 1363 for Sultan al-Nasir Hassan, and generally reckoned the greatest surviving work of Mamluk architecture. It is enormous — the walls rise 36 metres, and the entrance portal is 26 metres high.
The scale was ruinous. Construction consumed a vast share of the treasury, and the money came in part from the estates of those who died in the Black Death, which killed perhaps a third of Egypt’s population in 1348 and left the state as heir to enormous unclaimed property.
Hassan himself was murdered in 1361, before it was finished, and his body was never recovered — his mausoleum here is empty.
The building
It is a madrasa as much as a mosque: a cruciform plan with a central courtyard, four great vaulted iwans opening off it, and in each corner a separate school for one of the four Sunni schools of law — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali — each with its own courtyard, lecture hall and student cells stacked several storeys high.
Around a hundred students lived in it.
The qibla iwan is the finest space, with a Kufic inscription band in stucco running round it, a marble mihrab and a minbar. The mausoleum behind it has a soaring dome and the acoustic to match.
Two minarets were planned; one collapsed during construction in 1361, killing several hundred people, which contemporaries read as a judgement.
The legend that the architect had his hands cut off, or was executed, so that he could never build its equal is told about a great many buildings and is not true of this one either.
The strategic problem
The mosque stands directly below the Citadel, and its height made it a gift to anyone besieging the fortress. Rebels used its roof as an artillery platform more than once, and at one point the upper stairs were demolished to prevent it.
The Rifa’i Mosque
Immediately opposite, and deliberately built to match it — but between 1869 and 1912, in a nineteenth-century revival of Mamluk style. Comparing the two, a lane apart, shows exactly what the revival could and could not reproduce.
It contains the tombs of King Farouk, the last king of Egypt, and of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, who died in exile in Cairo in 1980 and was given a state funeral by Sadat.
Practicalities
A combined ticket covers both. Shoes off, modest dress, headscarf for women. Allow ninety minutes for the pair.
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The Mosque of Ibn Tulun
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