The Jami al-Qarafa Mosque or Qarafa Mosque, was the second major mosque built by the

Fatimid dynasty The Fatimid dynasty () was an Arab dynasty that ruled the Fatimid Caliphate, between 909 and 1171 CE. Descended from Fatima and Ali, and adhering to Isma'ili Shi'ism, they held the Isma'ili imamate, and were regarded as the rightful leaders o ...

in their new capital of

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

after their conquest of Egypt in 969. It was located in the

Qarafa The City of the Dead, or Cairo Necropolis, also referred to as the Qarafa (; locally pronounced as ''al-'arafa''), is a series of vast Islamic-era necropolises and cemetery, cemeteries in Cairo, Egypt. They extend to the north and to the south of ...

, the great necropolis of Cairo and

Fustat Fustat (), also Fostat, was the first capital of Egypt under Muslim rule, though it has been integrated into Cairo. It was built adjacent to what is now known as Old Cairo by the Rashidun Muslim general 'Amr ibn al-'As immediately after the Mus ...

. The mosque was built in 976 by order of

Al-Sayyida al-Mu'iziyya Al-Sayyida al-Mu'iziyya, mainly known as Durzan, was the main consort of Fatimid Caliph al-Muizz and the mother of the Fatimid imam-caliph al-Aziz. She was known as the first patroness of Fatimid architecture. Durzān also founded the second great ...

(also known as Durzan), mother of the Caliph al-'Aziz (r. 975–996), and her daughter Sitt al-Malik. It occupied the site of the older mosque of the Dome (''Masjid al-Qubba''), and apparently was very large. The historian al-Maqrizi says it was one of the most beautiful buildings of its day. A possible layout was described by Jonathan Bloom in his "The Mosque of the Qarafa", although Yūsuf Rāghib pointed out problems with this reconstruction in his "La mosquée d'al-Qarāfa." In Bloom's opinion, the mosque had a central aisle, wider than the others and with a higher roof, that led a dome over the spaces before the

mihrab ''Mihrab'' (, ', pl. ') is a niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the ''qibla'', the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca towards which Muslims should face when praying. The wall in which a ''mihrab'' appears is thus the "''qibla'' wall". ...

. This was similar to the mosques of al-Azhar and al-Hākim bi-Amr Allāh. The courtyard provided a place where the elite of Cairo would meet on Friday evenings in summer, and the covered

qibla The qibla () is the direction towards the Kaaba in the Great Mosque of Mecca, Sacred Mosque in Mecca, which is used by Muslims in various religious contexts, particularly the direction of prayer for the salah. In Islam, the Kaaba is believed to ...

part of the mosque gave them a meeting place in the cooler weather. State festivals would be held at the mosque in which food was distributed to all classes of people. According to Ibn al-Zayyāt, it was an especially holy mosque, one where people would seek refuge in times of trouble. When a great fire burned down most of al-Fustat in 1168 the mosque was almost completed destroyed, with only its green mihrab being preserved. It was later rebuilt as the Jami' al-Awliyya, but was little used after al-Qarafa became depopulated following a crisis in 1403.

Notes and references

Notes Citations Sources * * * * Mosques in Cairo Fatimid architecture in Cairo 10th-century mosques Religious buildings and structures completed in the 970s Former mosques in Africa Burned buildings and structures in Egypt {{Egypt-mosque-stub