Muhammad Ali's Egypt: the Citadel Mosque

Muhammad Ali Pasha (rahimahu Allah), an Ottoman commander of Albanian origin who became governor of Egypt in 1805, is remembered as the founder of the modern Egyptian state. Over his long rule he broke the old Mamluk order, in 1811 destroying the Mamluk grandees at a banquet in the Citadel of Cairo, and built in its place a centralised modern government: a conscript army, the nizam al-jadid, trained and equipped on the European model; state monopolies over agriculture and trade; arsenals, foundries, shipyards and textile factories; schools and missions sent to learn European science and engineering; and a printing press. With this machine he made Egypt all but independent of the Ottoman sultan whose viceroy he nominally remained, and his armies campaigned in Arabia against the first Saudi state, in the Sudan, in Greece, and into Ottoman Syria, at one point threatening Istanbul itself before the European powers checked him. As the crown of his new order he began, around 1830, the great mosque on the Citadel that bears his name, the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, built in the Ottoman imperial style with a high central dome, slender pencil minarets and alabaster facing, and completed after his death as his mausoleum; it deliberately answered the Istanbul skyline rather than the Mamluk Cairo below it. His dynasty would rule Egypt until 1952. This scene depicts that moment of transformation, the Citadel mosque rising under scaffolding while the new conscript army drills and the workshops of a modernising state work below.