The Mosque of Amr

‎

This lofty and solitary ruin on the west side of Old Cairo is the Mosque of Amr, the earliest Saracenic edifice in Egypt. It was built by Amr ibn el-Asi, the Arab conqueror of Egypt in the twenty-first year of the Hegira (A. D. 642), ten years after the death of Mohammed. It was constructed on the plan of a single quadrangle two hundred and twenty-five feet square, surrounded by a covered colonnade, one range of pillars in depth on the west side, four on the north, three on the south and six on the east, which is the place of prayer. The columns, two hundred and forty-five in number, were brought from earlier Roman and Byzantine buildings, which had been overthrown by earthquakes. The heterogeneous nature of the columns is accounted for by the fact that they were brought from other buildings in Cairo, ruined by the same earthquake, and were adapted to their new functions by rude procrustean methods of lengthening and shortening. This is called “The Crown of the Mosques.” In 1808 this mosque witnessed a remarkable scene. At the usual time for the rising of the Nile, the water began to fall. Dismayed by the strange phenomenon, the whole of the Mohammedan priesthood, the Christian clergy of every sect, and the Jewish rabbis, with one accord assembled in the mosque of Amr, to pray for the rising of the waters, and, it is said, that so effectual were their prayers that the river before long rose to its wanted fertilizing height. May such holy union again prevail among Jew, Christian, and Moslem in the East!