The Meccan Mosque became a model to the world of Al-Islam, and the nations that embraced the new faith copied the consecrated building, as religiously as Christendom produced imitations of the Holy Sepulchre.[FN#7] The Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem, of Amru at Babylon on the Nile, and of Taylun at Cairo were erected, with some trifling improvements, such as arched cloisters and inscribed cornices, upon the plan of the Ka’abah.  From Egypt and Palestine the ichnography spread far and wide.  It was modified, as might be expected, by national taste; what in Arabia was simple and elegant became highly ornate in Spain,[FN#8] florid in Turkey, sturdy in Syria, and effeminate in India.  Still divergence of detail had not, even after the lapse of twelve centuries, materially altered the fundamental form.

[p.96]Perhaps no Eastern city affords more numerous or more accessible specimens of Mosque architecture than Cairo.  Between 300 and 400 places of worship;[FN#9] some stately piles, others ruinous hovels, many new, more decaying and earthquake-shaken, with minarets that rival in obliquity the Pisan monster, are open to the traveller’s inspection.  And Europeans by following the advice of their hotel-keeper have penetrated, and can penetrate, into any one they please.[FN#10] If architecture be really what I believe it to be, the highest expression of a people’s artistic feeling,-highest because it includes all others,-to compare the several styles of the different epochs, to observe how each monarch building his own Mosque, and calling it by his own name, identified the manner of the monument with himself, and to trace the gradual decadence of art through one thousand two hundred years, down to the present day, must be a work of no ordinary interest to Orientalists.  The limits of my plan, however, compel me to place only the heads of the argument before the reader.  May I be allowed to express a hope that it will induce some learned traveller to investigate a subject in every way worthy his attention?

The desecrated Jami’ Taylun (ninth century) is simple and massive, yet elegant, and in some of its details peculiar.[FN#11] One of the four colonnades[FN#12] still remains unoccupied

[p.97]by paupers to show the original magnificence of the building; the other porches are walled up, and inhabited.  In the centre of a quadrangle about 100 paces square is a domed building springing from a square which occupies the proper place of the Ka’abah.  This “Jami’[FN#13]” Cathedral is interesting as a point of comparison.  If it be an exact copy of the Meccan temple as it stood in A.D. 879, it shows that the latter has greatly altered in this our modern day.

Next in date to the Taylun Mosque is that of the Sultan al-Hakim, third Caliph of the Fatimites, and founder of the Druze mysteries.  The minarets are remarkable in shape, as well as size:  they are unprovided with the usual outer gallery, they are based upon a cube of masonry, and they are pierced above with apertures apparently meaningless.  A learned Cairene informed me that these spires were devised by the eccentric monarch to disperse, like large censers, fragrant smoke over the city during the hours of prayer.  The Azhar and Hasanayn[FN#14] Mosques are simple and artless piles, celebrated for sanctity, but remarkable for nothing save ugliness.  Few buildings, however, are statelier in appearance,