The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

elow: Mosque of Sultan Hasan taken from the
al-Meidan. c. 1852–3.
154 The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo
built for himself. Here the designers have surrounded a white
marble Ottoman cenotaph with Iznik tiles set over a faithfully
reproduced Mamluk dado and mihrab. The tilework here is used
more selectively, and the Ottoman and Mamluk styles cohere with
a certain charm that has been beautifully captured in Ludwig
Deutsch’s (1855–1930) painting, The Prayer at the Tomb.
Al-Nasir Muhammad died in 1340 at the age of fifty-eight, and
he was succeeded by eight sons, two grandsons and two greatgrandsons
in quick succession. Most of them were mere puppets of
the amirs and none wielded any effective power. As a consequence
Egypt suffered forty-one years of political and economic turmoil
before the Bahri dynasty finally fell. Despite this adversity the arts
flowered and it was during this period that the Mamluks produced
their greatest architectural masterpiece, the mosque of Sultan Hasan
(1356–61). In 1347 Sultan Hasan was put on the throne at the age
of twelve but his reign was soon blighted by the Black Death and
famine. When he tried to assert his authority over the amirs he was