Al-Rifa'i Mosque

Two enormous mosques face each other across a narrow square below the Citadel, and most visitors only go into one. Sultan Hassan is the fourteenth-century masterpiece. Al-Rifa'i is its deliberate twin, built five and a half centuries later to match it in scale and outdo it in material — and it is the one with the royal dead in it.

Who is buried here

• King Farouk, Egypt's last reigning king, deposed in 1952
• King Fuad I, his father
• Khedive Isma'il, who built modern Cairo and bankrupted it
• Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, who died in exile in Cairo in 1980

The interior is late-Ottoman revival at full volume: forty kinds of marble, gilded ceilings, and a scale that feels imperial rather than devotional. Twenty-five minutes inside is enough, but do the two mosques together — the contrast between 1363 and 1912 is the whole point, and they are thirty metres apart.

Modest dress, shoes off, and women should bring a scarf.

Begun in 1869 for Khushyar Hanim, mother of Khedive Isma'il, who wanted a dynastic mausoleum that would also absorb the shrine of the medieval Sufi saint al-Rifa'i already on the site. Work stopped in 1880 when both she and her architect died, and the shell stood unfinished for twenty-five years.

Max Herz, the Hungarian architect who ran the committee for the conservation of Arab monuments, completed it between 1905 and 1912, deliberately quoting Mamluk detail so that the new mosque would sit against Sultan Hassan as a partner rather than an intruder.

The Shah's burial in 1980 was a political act: Anwar Sadat had given him asylum when no other country would, and put him among Egypt's own kings. Sadat was assassinated the following year. The two men's decisions are why an Iranian monarch lies in a Cairo mosque built by a Hungarian for an Ottoman-Egyptian dynasty.