Mohammad Ali Pasha Mosque

Spring 2018 Muhammad Ali Pasha Mosque Done By: Abdallah Mouselly Mohammad Khezri U15101138 U15101101 Introduction Islamic architecture is basically known as the architecture that was developed during Islam and the spread of Islam and it is famous for its mosques. As we know, Islam started from Mecca, Saudi Arabia in the 7th century and then it started spreading slowly around the world. The first mosque that was built in Islam is next to the Prophet Mohammad house which is known as the Al-Masjid 1 Annabawi (figure 1). This mosque had a hypostyle Figure 1: An image showing the initial shape of first mosque in Islam which is the AL Masjid Annabawi* plan layout which helped in the inspiration of other mosque layouts in Islamic architecture. Throughout the Islamic world, there were a lot of dynasties that were spread around the world. Most of the mosques that were made had similar plan layouts. However, the differences between them could be either in their façade, decoration, number of minarets or other smaller and simple features. In this report, we chose Muhammad Ali Pasha mosque which is located in Cairo, Egypt as our case study to analyze it. Mentioning its history and geographical location, architectural characteristics, materials, and structural system. Hillenbrand, R. - Islamic Architecture – 2000 - Edinburgh University Press – Edinburgh, UK - Introduction *http://www.islamicity.org/7942/the-form-of-the-prophets-mosque/ 1 Page | 1 History and Geographical Location The Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha (or as known as the Alabaster Mosque) is a mosque that was constructed in 1848 AD in the northwestern corner within the citadel of Salah Al-Din in Cairo, Egypt. This mosque (figure 2 ), which was made during the Ottoman period or dynasty, was made by the architect Yusuf Bushnak who got his inspiration for the design of the mosque from the Sultan Ahmed Mosque that was built in the year 1616 AD in Istanbul, Turkey. 2 Being placed on the foot of the Mugattam hills, the Figure 2: A picture showing the Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha * mosque outshines the whole citadel. The construction of the mosque took almost two decades (without interruption) to be built and it has the features of the Ottoman architecture (since it was constructed during that time) and was funded by Muhammad Ali Pasha in the memory of his oldest son Tusun Pasha who died in 1816 AD.3 Unfortunately, Muhammad Ali was not able to see the mosque after the construction was done because during the construction of this mosque, he passed away and he was buried in a tomb (as seen in figure 3) that he had already made for himself out of Carrara marble in the courtyard of his mosque after Figure 3: A figure showing the tomb of Muhammad Ali Pasha ** the transfer of his body from Hawsh al Bahasa in 1857 AD. Kacicnik, Matjaz - Interior of the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, Citadel, Cairo, Egypt – 16th Oct 2008 https://www.360cities.net/image/interior-of-the-mosque-of-muhammad-ali-citadel-cairo-egypt 3 Ibrahim, Mostafa - The Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha -4th Sep 2009-https://www.360cities.net/image/1-3-1 2 * http://www.albawabhnews.com/1967487 ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Than217 Page | 2 After his death, Abbas Pasha I took the power and he was the one who finalized the construction of the mosque by adding the remaining stuff and materials such as the marbles, carvings, gilding and a copper room for Muhammad Ali’s cemetery.4 In 1899 AD, the mosque was in a very bad and poor condition and a lot of cracks showed on its walls and domes. Consequently, a maintenance took place. However, not all the problems and cracks that the mosque had were solved in that maintenance. Therefore, in 1931 AD while king Fouad I was the ruler, he gathered a group of excellent architects and they suggested the demolition of some of the domes that the mosque had and rebuilding it with no changes being made to the original design of these domes. With no delays made, the demolition took place and the construction (including the painting and other maintenance stuff) was done and the mosque opened its doors again to the society and people in 1939 AD.5 Since then, the mosque has been active (except for several maintenances that took place) and open for praying, worshiping, and tours. 4 Torky, Tarek - The Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha http://www.discoverislamicart.org/database_item.php?id=monument;isl;eg;mon01;21;en 5 Behrens - Abouseif. Islamic Architecture in Cairo – http://www.discoverislamicart.org/database_item.php?id=monument;isl;eg;mon01;21;en Page | 3 Architectural Characteristics Muhammad Ali Pasha mosque was designed by Ottoman architect (Yousef Bu Shnaq), who was inspired by Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque) in Istanbul Turkey6. It consists of two parts: a covered part (Prayer hall) and an open part (courtyard / Sahn) and this Ottoman designed mosque was not one of its kind in Egypt in that time*, however, it was distinguished with its large scale and size which is obvious when you look at the radius and height of the dome, the height of the minarets, or the big area that the courtyard covers.7 Entrance: Although Ottoman designed mosques has the entrance on the axis of symmetry, in Muhammad Ali mosque the entrances are on the sides of the courtyard, and in the place that the entrance is supposed to be there is a clock tower which is twice the height of the surrounding Figure 4: Muhammad Ali Mosque Plan7 porticoes that was a present from King Louis Philippe (Figure 6).7,8 Sahn (Courtyard): It has a square shape surrounded by four porticoes consisting of equally sized bays. Two porticoes bays contain two of the aforementioned entry gates in addition to a third gate leading into the prayer hall, also the courtyard has a centrally located ablution fountain composed of octagonally arranged arcade of columns supporting a lead-covered wooden dome (Figure 5).7,8 Figure 5: Fountain6 Figure 6: The Clock Tower6 Akasha, Alia -Al A a a Al Is la ia fi Mas Isla i A hite tu e i Egypt –2008–Bardi Publish–Giza, Egypt– Page:58 * Egypt had in that time Sinan Pasha Mosque, and Queen Safia Mosque with an Ottoman style. 7 Zaki, Ahmad – Al Taghaio fi Al asajid Al oase a The ha ge i ode os ues a hite tu e – 2001 – Ain Shams University - Cairo, Egypt - Page: 50 -58. 8 Al Assad, Mohammad – The Mos ue of Muha ad Ali i Cai o Mu a as - no9 – 1992 – Page: 39-55 6 Page | 4 Prayer Hall: A squarish area that is covered by main large dome supported by four half domes and standing on four large piers, in addition to four smaller domes on the corners, later they added an entrance for the imam from qibla wall through the mihrab which is covered by a half dome as it is shown in (Figure 7).7,9 Minarets: The mosque has two main Ottoman style minarets Figure 7: Northern western elevation(Left), Section through qibla wall(Right)7. (Pencil Style) that are located on the northern western corners of the mosque, and each one consists of four parts (Square -Octagon - Octagon - Pointed octagonal prism).7 Openings & Windows10: Although the mosques have several kinds of openings and windows with different places, the mosque did not have enough natural light. However, these windows and openings can be sorted into four main groups: (Figure 7) Figure 8: Semi-Circular windows from group 3.7 1- Repeated rectangular windows, that are located on the lower part of the walls. 2- Windows that were on the base of the domes (Clerestory). 3- The semi-circular windows that were located above entrances for ventilation, and above some windows 4- Repeated rectangular windows, that are found on the upper part of the walls which have a similar function to the ones on the dome. 5- The circular window that is located above the mihrab on the qibla wall. Figure 9: Rectangular window from group 1&4 with the semicircular from group 3.7 Rabbat, N. – The Citadel of Cairo (The Aga Khan Award for Architecture) – 1989 – Benteli AG – Geneva, Switzerland – Page:28 7 Zaki, Ahmad – Al Taghaio fi Al asajid Al o’ase a The ha ge i ode os ues a hite tu e – 2001 – Ain Shams University- Cairo, Egypt - Page: 50 -58. 10 Yousef, Nabil – Ashghal Al ade that Al a at Altha et fi aha atha Al Qahi a Al Isla ia Metal Patte Works in The Most Important Monuments of Islami Cai o – 2003 – 1st Ed – Madbouly Books – Cairo, Egypt – Page: 154 to 156. 9 Page | 5 Decoration7: Several types of decorations adorn the interior and exterior spaces of Muhammad Ali Mosque - Arabesque: That uses random patterns of leaves and flower petals, and they are usually found on the capitals of the piers, columns and the lower part of the wall. Calligraphy: They chose poetries and some quotes from different languages that use Arabic letters for decoration, like Persian, old Turkish and for sure Arabic language. Paints & Drawings: A drawings of natural scenes from Turkey and the Mediterranean Sea were used on the interior side of the dome of the ablution fountain. Materials & Construction System Muhammad Ali Pasha mosque was built using stone, and the walls were covered with alabaster which was brought from mines from the countryside. Small domes were used to cover the porticoes, and these domes were supported by arches and columns (Figure10).11 As mentioned before the prayer hall was covered by a large central dome which is supported by 4 half domes, with 4 domes on the corners, and they are supported by the 4 piers and the load bearing wall.7 At that time Muhammad Ali Pasha Mosque was considered as one of the largest structures that were constructed with a 20.5m diameter for the central dome and minarets that reach 80m height.7 Figure 10: A part of portico from Muhammad Ali Mosque. (http://www.3dmekanlar.com/en/m ohammed-ali-mosque.html) Figure 11: The domes and piers (http://www.3dmekanlar.com/en/mohamm ed-ali-mosque.html) Zaki, Ahmad – Al Taghaio fi Al asajid Al o’ase a The ha ge i ode os ues a hite tu e – 2001 – Ain Shams University- Cairo, Egypt - Page: 50 -58. 11 Ahmad, Mahmoud – Daleel Mojez le ash’ha al atha al al a a ia il Qahi a A B ief Guide fo The Fa ous Arabic Mo u e ts of Cai o – 1938 – Alamiria printing house – Cairo, Egypt – Page: 216 7 Page | 6 Conclusion In the conclusion, Muhammad Ali Pasha Mosque is a stylistic composition designed to simulate the early style of Ottoman mosques of Istanbul from 16th and 17th century although it was built in the 19th century, consequently, it is the first example of classical Ottoman revival. The mosque of Muhammad Ali not only sets out to establish visual and formal links to the great imperial mosques of the classical Ottoman period, but it also utilizes dimensions expressing an equivalent level of monumentality. If one considers this structure’s general area, the size of its courtyard, the diameter and the height of its central dome, and the height of its minarets, it becomes obvious that this is a structure which, in size at least, rivals the largest Ottoman mosques. It is also the largest mosque to be built in the first half of the 19th century.8 Its monumentality is apparent when one compares its dimensions to one of the most celebrated mosques of the Ottoman architectural heritage, the mosque of Sultan Ahmad. The area of Muhammad Ali Mosque prayer hall is comparable to that of the mosque of Sultan Ahmad. Its courtyard is larger in area than the one in Sultan Ahmad Mosque, also it is higher than Sultan Ahmad Mosque.8 19th-century guides and scholars asserted that it was a copy of the Nur Uthmaniyya Mosque in Istanbul, yet the plan of the mosque more closely resembles Istanbul’s mosque of Sultan Ahmad. The archaism in the mosque of Muhammad Ali’s plan and appearance must have been intentional, and the message of loyalty to the Ottoman past and the independence from the Ottoman present are equally well expressed in the mosque’s referential style and location. Because Cairo was transitioning from a dependent city to an independent capital city.9 Figure 12: A sketch of Muhammad Ali Mosque by Mohammad Khezri U15101101 Al Assad, Mohammad – The Mos ue of Muha ad Ali i Cai o Mu a as - no9 – 1992 – Page: 39-55 Rabbat, N. – The Citadel of Cairo (The Aga Khan Award for Architecture) – 1989 – Benteli AG – Geneva, Switzerland – Page:28,29 8 9 Page | 7 List of Reference & Resources 1. Hillenbrand, R. - Islamic Architecture – 2000 - Edinburgh University Press – Edinburgh, UK - Introduction. 2. Kacicnik, Matjaz - Interior of the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, Citadel, Cairo, Egypt – 16th Oct 2008 https://www.360cities.net/image/interior-of-the-mosque-of-muhammad-alicitadel-cairo-egypt 3. Ibrahim, Mostafa - The Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha -4th Sep 2009https://www.360cities.net/image/1-3-1 4. Torky, Tarek - The Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha http://www.discoverislamicart.org/database_item.php?id=monument;isl;eg;mon01;21;en 5. Behrens - Abouseif. Islamic Architecture in Cairo – http://www.discoverislamicart.org/database_item.php?id=monument;isl;eg;mon01;21;en 6. Akasha, Alia -Al Amara Al Is lamia fi Masr “Islamic Architecture in Egypt”–2008–Bardi Publish–Giza, Egypt–Page:58 7. Zaki, Ahmad – Al Taghaior fi Al masajid Al mo’asera “The change in modern mosques architecture” – 2001 – Ain Shams University- Cairo, Egypt - Page: 50 -58. 8. Al Assad, Mohammad – “The Mosque of Muhammad Ali in Cairo” Muqarnas - no9 – 1992 – Page: 39-55 9. Rabbat, N. – The Citadel of Cairo (The Aga Khan Award for Architecture) – 1989 – Benteli AG – Geneva, Switzerland – Page:28,29 10. Yousef, Nabil – Ashghal Almaden that Alnamat Althabet fi aham athar Al Qahira Al Islamia “Metal Pattern Works in The Most Important Monuments of Islamic Cairo” – 2003 – 1st Ed – Madbouly Books – Cairo, Egypt – Page: 154 to 156. 11. Ahmad, Mahmoud – Daleel Mojez le ash’har al athar al al arabia bil Qahira “A Brief Guide for The Famous Arabic Monuments of Cairo” – 1938 – Alamiria printing house – Cairo, Egypt – Page: 216 Page | 8 ‫‪Table of Figures‬‬ ‫‪ 1‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Figure 1‬‬ ‫‪ 2‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Figure 2 & 3‬‬ ‫‪ 4‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Figure 4,5 & 6‬‬ ‫‪ 5‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Figure 7,8 & 9‬‬ ‫‪ 6‬ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Figure 10 & 11‬‬ ‫‪ 7‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Figure 12‬‬ ‫‪Page | 9‬‬ ‫‪Table of Contents‬‬ ‫‪ 1‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Introduction‬‬ ‫‪ 2‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪History and Geographical Location‬‬ ‫‪ 4‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Architectural Characteristics‬‬ ‫‪ 5‬ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Materials & Construction System‬‬ ‫‪ 7‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Conclusion‬‬ ‫‪ 8‬ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪List of Reference & Resources‬‬ ‫‪ 9‬ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ‪Table of Figures‬‬ ‫‪Page | 10‬‬