Position 6 - Tomb Mosque Of Sultan Kait Bey, The Most Beautiful Of The Tombs Of Cairo

As we left our last point of view, we turned almost toward the south, and we are now facing the southwest. The city is now on our right, the desert on our left, and also behind us, stretching away to the Isthmus of Suez and the plains of southern Palestine. Here before us rises the lovely tomb-mosque of Kait Bey, built in 1474, by the last of the really great Mamlukes who preceded the Turkish conquest, which occurred a generation later. The powerful and sagacious Kait Bey inaugurated a veritable Augustan age for Cairo, and brief as it was the city was adorned with a host of magnificent buildings, which to-day form its chief architectural beauties.

As we have before remarked, a mosque was originally only a place of assembly in the open air, a square court surrounded by a colonnaded portico. When it became customary to inter the great in a mosque, a dome was placed over the addition containing the tomb. As an architectural element the dome was originally and for a long period the invariable accompaniment of a tomb in Saracen architecture. This dome, the gradual development of the minaret, and the addition of a façade taken from the buildings of the Crusaders, gave the tomb-mosque a finished architectural unity which the earlier building did not possess.

These important additions necessitated many supplementary details, which were new to the mosque. See how skilfully the transition is made from the square building below to the circular base of the dome which rests upon it. That exquisite dome is, like the rest of the building, of stone, and the rich carving upon it is the perfection of geometrical design in which the Saracen artist has contributed so much to decorative art.

Under Saladin the plan of a mosque was modified and the four porticoed sides of the old court were extended outward in the form of a cross, a form introduced from Persia. The court at the same time became smaller and the four ends of the cross, or the transepts as we might call them, were used by teachers of the four great schools of orthodox Moslem theology as lecture halls. Such a building was and still is called a “medresa,” or place of teaching, a college. By the time of Kait Bey, this form had in its turn been subjected to change, in that three of the four transepts had gradually been reduced in size and the central court so contracted that it was roofed over. Various irregularities also modified the old, fixed plan, so that you can hardly follow it here.

Although in decorative beauty such buildings as these are unsurpassed in any art, yet as a whole they do not produce an impression of unity and repose such as we receive from the classic or the ancient Egyptian temples. The only building in Cairo, comparable to the works of ancient Egypt, which we shall later visit, is the mosque of Sultan Hasan, which we viewed from the citadel.

We must now examine some of the more important interior arrangements of Kait Bey's mosque. That wall which faces toward our left, looks southeast, that is, toward Mecca, in which direction every Moslem must look when he prays. Hence if we enter this tall, narrow door in the front we shall find ourselves in a large hall of worship, which in the original mosque-form, was one side of the court, roofed over for the protection of worshipers.

On the inside of that wall, therefore, we shall find the arrangements by which the Moslem architect designates the proper direction for prayer in such a house of worship. There, too, we shall be able to observe the tracery of those arched windows of which we see a pair on either side of the small circular window in the centre.