Mosque of Muhammad Ali, Cairo

I will not attempt to give full details on the history and scope of this mosque. If you're interested, there is always Wikipedia. I was tested on all of it, and I have no further desire to dredge it from my memory. Study on your own time, please. In the meantime, here are pictures. And a few basic--

FACTS:

1. The dome has a perfect 21 meter-diameter. It's 52 meters high.

2. The interior is lit by over three hundred circled orbs of light, suspended from long chains from the high ceiling. They represent each day of the year. (Some of the lights had gone out when I was there, and I was thinking about how those must have been dreary days for someone.)

3. The largest mosque built in the first half of the nineteenth century (took 18 years to build,) it was commissioned by Muhammad Ali Pasha (its namesake,) and was a memorial for Ali's oldest son, Tusun Pasha, who died in 1816.

4. The interior walls are alabaster. The exterior is mostly marble. That's a lot of expensive rock.

5. The carpets inside are OLD. Really old. You have to take off your shoes. How old are they? Um, older than my grandma. By a few decades. They've only been replaced once, and the mosque was completed in 1848, so you do the math.

6. The balcony has a superb view of all of Cairo. I stood there with Greg and we talked about how just one city had 13 million people in it (and yes, I realize that there are cities that scrape a billion, but work with me) and we realized that if we took every Mormon in the world and shoved them into Cairo-- we would only make one city.

7. I have been there. But at the time, I was so exhausted (it was the last thing I saw before leaving "Egypt" for the Sinai peninsula. Egypt is in quotes here because the Sinai is part of Egypt, it's just not... Egypt. The Sinai is its own piece of barren wasteland, I don't see how its tied to Egypt at all. ...but don't tell the Egyptians that. Where was I? Oh yeah. The Mosque.

8. I did not take all of these photos. I just took most of them. ;) In fact, I took the night capture from the highway when I was inside a bus. Aha! Top that.

9. I posted way too many photos, and I talked much more than I intended to. Ooops.