The Mosque of Timraz al-Ahmadi

In 1472, a Mamluk emir named Timraz built a mosque here, overlooking the canal that ran the course of what is today Port Said Street.

Who was Emir Timraz?

Some say he was Emir Timraz al-Shamsi, a military leader under Sultan Qaytbay. This Timraz was a heroic fighter in the campaigns against Shah Suwar, a Turkoman lord in Anatolia who rebelled against Mamluk domination. Timraz charged into battle against Suwar’s forces, paying no heed even when an arrow pierced his hand. He was as honorable as he was courageous. He convinced Suwar to surrender, giving his personal promise that he would not be harmed. So he was furious when the sultan had Suwar executed. “By God, every time I pass Suwar’s grave, I feel ashamed,” Timraz always said. Still, he rose through the ranks, became very wealthy, and Qaytbay eventually made him atabek, the supreme commander of the military.

But that’s the wrong Timraz.

Timraz al-Shamsi died in July 1497, beheaded while fighting in a revolt against Qaytbay’s son.

The builder of this mosque, Timraz al-Ahmadi, died September 3, 1473, according to the stone inscription above the entrance to his tomb inside the mosque.

The lintel inscription at entrance to Timraz’s tomb

Perhaps his tomb gives a clue to his identity.

His tomb is painted green, with bold white calligraphy declaring, “The Shrine of Sidi Sheikh Timraz al-Ahmadi, Knower of God.” Those titles and the green of the tomb suggest our Timraz was a Sufi holy man, one of the charismatic ascetics beloved for the miracles they performed and blessings they could give.

But he was not that either.

Timraz al-Ahmadi was a minor emir who helped run the Sultan’s stables. Other than the inscription above his tomb entrance, the only record of his existence comes in a single line by a historian of the time, ibn Iyas, who writes that in March 1472, “construction was completed on the mosque founded by Timraz, one of the emirs of the stables, next to the Omarshah Bridge.”

That’s it. Unless a foundation document for the mosque is buried away in some Egyptian archive, nothing more can ever be known about him.

One of the joys of Cairo’s monuments is how their identities shift and morph over time. Generations of stories and characters flow into a monument and infuse it with new life, they intermingle, strands of different stories merge, bits of stories fall away, one story swallows another. Then they drain away and leave only traces — a name on an inscription, or something vaguer, a feeling that lingers in the back reaches of the arches and alcoves, hides in the joints of the wooden screens, watches from the dim balconies overhead.

This lovely mosque is testimony to that. Three centuries after Timraz died, his mosque was adopted by a noble family of the Ottoman Era, and it gained a new life as a center for Sufis.

This was the Tufenkjian-Chamsi family. They were a family of military officers serving in the Ottoman Mounted Musketeer Corps (which was called the Tufenkjian, giving them the first part of their name). Their mansion was located in the alley behind this mosque, Darb al-Shamsi, from which they got the second part of their name. Their story is told by the modern-day Egyptian historian, Samir Raafat (who is one of their descendants), in his book “Three Centuries of Privilege.”

They were one of the many military households competing for power and influence under Ottoman rule. They also became closely bound to the Qadiriyya Order of Sufism after a family patriarch married the daughter of a prominent Qadiriyya sheikh from Hama, Syria.

In 1766, one of five brothers in the family, Emir Hassan, renovated the Mosque of Timraz, which by then was nothing but a crumbling ruin neighboring their mansion. He turned it into a zawiya, or lodge, where Qadiriyya followers could gather.

View from gallery over the tomb of Sidi Mohammed al-Bahloul

It became part of the household infrastructure. The manor next door was the family’s political headquarters, where its retainers and soldiers were based and where the heads of the family could meet with their allies and clents. The mosque, meanwhile, connected the family with the broader community. The Qadiriyya Order’s members included merchants, tradesmen and artisans, and in the evenings, the mosque would have hummed with the men’s presence, as much a social club as a religious site. They sat in circles to study or hear sermons; they chanted in weekly zikr rituals; on public occasions they held processions in the nearby streets. When one of Hassan Tufenkjian’s brothers, Hussein, died, 100 Qadiriyya Sufis marched in his funeral procession from the mosque.

At some point in the Ottoman era, another character was introduced into this mosque: a Sufi sheikh named Sidi Mohammed al-Bahloul. He was buried in the tomb at the mosque entrance, the one visible through the wooden grillwork in the entry portal. It’s he who gives this monument its perhaps more widely used name, the Bahloul Mosque.

Bahloul is a name often given to Sufis, and it’s a word that carries a good bit of weight.

It’s come to mean a clown or a court jester, but at its root it means someone who has been let loose. A neglected camel with no herder, left to wander, is “baahil.” A bahloul is a figure unmoored, no longer bound by the trappings of society. From there, a bahloul becomes a holy madman and a wise fool.

Our Mohammed al-Bahloul here is a blank slate, nothing is known about him. So other famous Bahlouls have been read into him, transported here across centuries and distances.

Some say the man in this tomb is Bahloul ibn Ishaq al-Anbari, an Iraqi judge and Hadith transmitter who died in 911 and whose family of religious scholars spread around the Middle East.

Others say it is Bahloul, brother of Haroun al-Rashid, the glorious Abbasid Caliph who ruled from Baghdad in the 8th Century and was the star of many of the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights. That, in turn, is a transmogrification of yet another story; Harun al-Rashid isn’t known to have had a brother named Bahloul, but he did have a famous legendary encounter with a wise fool named Bahloul.

In one version of the story, Haroun al-Rashid was riding outside his place and he passed a cemetery, where Bahloul was sitting on a grave.

Bahloul shouted out to him: “Haroun, you madman, when will you return to sanity?”

Haroun approached him and said, “Am I a madman or are you, seeing as how you’re the one sitting on a grave.”

“I’m the sane one,” Bahloul said, “because I know that this” — and he pointed at Haroun’s palace — “is only transient, while THIS is permanent,” and he pointed at the grave. “You have built up your palace, but you have let your grave fall into ruin.” Haroun grew afraid and pleaded to know more. “All you need is God’s Book,” Bahloul said.

Our Mohammed al-Bahloul buried here is no doubt a local holy man from the Ottoman Era. But he has absorbed the tales of all the other Bahlouls, which only adds to the glamour of closeness to God that emanates from him.

Some of that glamour rubbed off on Timraz. Over the years of lying in the next tomb over, Timraz lost his identity as a minor emir of the stables and became a holy man as well, a “knower of God.”

One member of the Tufenkjian-Shamsi family, Mohammed Chamsi, wanted to bathe in al-Bahloul’s glamour until Resurrection Day. So when he died in the early 1800s, his body was placed inside the same sarcophagus next to al-Bahloul’s remains. Chamsi had a stone inscription put up by the tomb upon his burial — it’s gone now, probably stolen just in the past few years, but the historian Raafat preserves a photo of it — and it beautifully expresses how intimate with these saints people felt:

“When death catches up to my soul, I’ve set my burial by al-Bahloul’s side/ So as I plead for my Creator’s forgiveness, I’ll have a friend, a companion, and my loneliness will subside.”

The sarcophagus of Sidi Mohammed Bahloul (with Mohammed Chamsi squeezed inside too)

Chamsi, who was a military aide to the ruler of the time Mohammed Ali Pasha, did a second renovation to the mosque in 1816. It’s worth looking around inside. The wooden ceilings are painted with fields of stars and arabesque designs, and on the roof you can get a closer look at the minaret, the dome of Timraz’s tomb and the wood and stained-glass skylight, known as a shayshukha, as well as a view over Port Said Street.

Exiting the mosque, take a left, go down Port Said Street to the Sabil of al-Sitt Saliha. This baroquely elaborate sabil was built in 1741 by a noblewoman of the Ottoman Era, of whom nothing is known. It was originally located further north on Port Said Street but was moved here in the early 20th Century when the street was widened.

Enter the alley right next to it and wander around Darb al-Shamsi and nearby streets. The mansion of the Tufenkjian-Chamsi family is long gone, but this little pocket of alleyways holds some lovely early 20th Century apartment buildings, where the features that remain — an elaborately carved wooden door, swoops of Art Nouveau moldings, a dignified stack of Diocletian windows — shine through the neglect and decay.