Cairo Image: Mosque of Sultan Hasan

Sultan Hasan Mosque - 1894

Through a twitter post I came across the New York Public Library digital gallery. One of their galleries is a listing of image sets from 19th century books about the Middle East. The 19th century is a rich period for travel and for expensively produced books that brought far away places closer through the use of images. All the images from these books are now out of copyright, so they are open to use and re-use.. you just need to get your hands on the books. It’s been a mystery to me why more of these images are not available on the Internet, since they are perfectly reproduceable. But the NYPL has them online.. and you can buy high quality versions of all these images.

My goal will be to post samples from this and other collections to give a sense of the representations of Cairo in the 19th century. I’ll make comments to explain where the photos were taken and what is unexpected in these photos.

photo book source for image

This image is from a photo book entitled “Palestine and Egypt”.. dating from March 1894. The image of the Mosque of Sultan Hasan is a canonical view of Cairo. The photographer is looking down on it from the Citadel. It’s a vantage point that most tourists will run into if they visit the Citadel. In front of the mosque is a grove of trees, perhaps for a park? Today all that space serves as a large turnabout for cars. To the right of the Mosque of Sultan Hasan is the still unfinished construction for the al-Rifa’i Mosque. The mosque was left unfinished for a number of years until 1905 when construction began again (it was finished in 1912). The photographer has pushed our attention away from that unfinished structure.

The buildings in the immediate vicinity of the mosque have changed quite a bit. In the historic photo they are low two story structures, with an arcade that likely gave entrance to the row of stores. Today those buildings are all gone, and what surrounds the mosque are apartment buildings such as these:

MS

I’ve got no problem with apartment buildings, but they do take away from the way this truly monumental mosque stands out in relation to its surroundings. It is also easy to forget the extent to which the cityscape has changed in this last century.