The Mosque of Moghulbay Taz

or

The Architect’s Daughter

This is a pretty little mosque on a pretty, leafy lane of Hilmiyya, built in 1466. Officially, it’s known by the name of its builder, the Mamluk Emir Moghulbay Taz. But it’s better known as the Mosque of Bint al-Mi’mar, the Architect’s Daughter.

After the grandiose monuments of Saliba Street, it feels intimate and homey, with its modest facade and stumpy, cut-off minaret. Hidden behind the flame trees, it’s a good neighbor to the furniture makers in the alley’s workshops, lending them its portal when they need a place to stow the wooden frame of a sofa. In Ramadan, the women sit at its doorstep making roqaq bread. Along its facade, the three windows hang out all day, their aged feet sunk into the pavement, and observe from under the brims of their trefoiled lintels, gossiping to each other about the alley’s comings and goings. 

Moghulbay Taz was not a figure of great significance. He spent much of his life as a common Mamluk soldier until he was elevated to emir status in his 60s. Briefly reaching the top inner coterie of leadership, he joined a failed uprising against Sultan Yalbay and was exiled to the Mediterranean coastal city of Dumyat. There he died a few months later in 1468, aged more than 80.  

Who, then, was Bint al-Mi’mar?

No one seems to know — not the neighbors, not the mosque’s custodians. No record identifies her. No secondary literature about the site even addresses the question.

The lintels of the facade windows with their trefoil decorations. Each lintel is combined with a relieving arch above it and, between them, the “nafees,” which in Ottoman buildings is often filled with tiles.

But I think that I may have found her in a noblewoman of the Ottoman Era — Hafeeza bint al-Mi’mar

Hafeeza lived some three centuries after the mosque was built. During that time, the Ottomans had swept in and toppled the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517. The Mamluks themselves were not eliminated, however, and over time they regained strength. By the mid-1700s, Egypt was still a domain of the Ottoman Sultan, and governors from Istanbul rotated through the Citadel every few years, but it was the Mamluk beys who actually ruled. Their households fought each other continually to be on top.

Hafeeza’s father, Ali Agha al-Mi’mar, was a powerful commander in those battles. “A known hero and one of the few truly brave men,” as the great Ottoman-era historian al-Jabarti described him. A large man with a roaring voice, he would charge headlong into battle on his horse, swinging a heavy club laced with iron spikes that could split an opponent’s helmet and skull in one blow. He was known for speaking the truth, even to his masters. For all his military prowess, Ali Agha was a humble man, a follower of the Khalwatiya Sufi order and a patron of clerics and scholars, according to al-Jabarti.

(Why he’s called al-Mi’mar, I find no explanation. Perhaps he or one of his ancestors served in the post of chief architect, which was a largely administrative position.)

At some point he was given a young Mamluk. He raised and trained the boy, who came to be named Hassan Kashef al-Mi’mar. Intelligent and handsome, with beautiful dark eyes, the young man eventually married Ali Agha’s daughter Hafeeza, in a grand celebration feast thrown by her father.

In 1777, Ali Agha was part of a military expedition sent south to put down two renegade Mamluk grandees, Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey. Outside Beni Sweif at a little town on the Nile called Bayada, the Beys’ forces surprised the expedition’s camp with a pre-dawn attack. Ali Agha rallied and charged right at Murad Bey. But he was shot in the neck by a musket, fell from his horse and was killed. Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey went on to seize power and rule Egypt until the French invasion.

With Ali Agha’s death, his son-in-law Hassan Kashef al-Mi’mar inherited his household. For more than a decade, he prospered and rose within the Mamluk factions opposed to Murad Bey.

But a twist of fate led to the family’s destruction. In 1793, Hassan Kashef went on Hajj, and as the caravan entered the Arabian Peninsula, it was attacked by Bedouin. He rode out to fight them and was killed. The Bedouin then massacred the pilgrims and rode off with all their goods. The caravan’s survivors buried their dead, including Hassan Kashef, in the nearby ruins of the fabled desert city of Midian and then straggled home.

Hafeeza was heartbroken. Even worse, she was now unprotected in the face of her husband’s enemy, Murad Bey. The bey’s men stormed her home, confiscated it and looted everything inside. He then forced Hafeeza to marry one of his Mamluks, Suleiman Bey.

Suleiman Bey was a cruel and brutal man. In a touch right out of a bad mafia movie, he was known as “The Relaxer” because when he wanted his henchmen to murder someone, he told them, “Take him and help him relax.”

He met his end in 1807. By this time, Mohammed Ali Pasha had seized power in Egypt, massacred the Mamluk leaders in the Citadel and was chasing their remnants around Upper Egypt. In a battle between the Pasha’s troops and the Mamluk fugitives near Assiout, Suleiman Bey’s head was sheared off by a cannonball. It’s said the Relaxer’s body was identifiable only by a ring on his finger.

Hafeeza had her husband Hassan Kashef’s body disinterred from the desert and brought back to Cairo, where she buried him beside her father in the southern cemetery.  

So assuming this is the right bint al-Mi’mar, what is her connection to this mosque? A likely scenario is that, somewhere along the way, Hafeeza renovated the Mosque of Moghulbay Taz, as Ottoman noblemen and women often did with dilapidated Mamluk monuments, and it came to be known for her along with the alley itself, Haret Bint al-Mi’mar. Perhaps her home was on this alley as well.

In the end, this is just a guess. Al-Jabarti makes no mention of Hafeeza renovating this mosque. The mosque interior holds no inscriptions that might provide answers. (The interior is entirely modern. In the early 20th century, the Comite, the body tasked with documenting and preserving Egypt’s Islamic and Christian monuments, found that only the facade and minaret could be restored, the rest was just too ruined. A new mosque was built in its place.) To be totally up-front about it, my choice of Hafeeza is solely because she’s the only bint al-Mi’mar mentioned in any histories. I think it’s right — how many bint al-Mi’mars could there be? — but it’s not a very strong basis by any standard. There could be an entirely different explanation.

But until one emerges, I’m happy to believe it was Hafeeza. We hear nothing more of her after she is forcibly married off. There’s no word whether she outlived the monstrous Relaxer, no satisfying end to her story after she was so brutally used in her era’s power politics. She just disappears. So I like to think that at least it’s her memory that’s preserved on the door of this mosque, on the street sign of this little alley and in the minds of her neighbors — even if no one realizes it.

Photo of the Mosque of Moghulbay Taz from the 1933 report of the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe. Compare to the present-day photo, how far the ground level has risen since then, covering the bottom of the windows.