Less than ten years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the new religion of Islam arrived in Egypt with the army of Amr ibn al-As in AD 641. Amr immediately established his capital at al-Fustat, just south of modern Cairo, and there he built Africa's first mosque, one still in regular use today. Since then, governors, caliphs, sultans, amirs, beys, pashas, among others, have built mosques, madrasas, and mausoleums throughout Egypt in a changing sequence of Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and modern styles. In this fully color-illustrated, large-format volume, a leading historian of Islamic art and culture celebrates the great variety of Egypt's mosques and related religious buildings, from the early congregational mosques, through the medieval mausoleum-madrasas, to the neighborhood mosques of the Ottoman and modern periods. With outstanding architectural photography and authoritative analytical texts, this book will be valued as the finest on the subject by scholars and general readers alike.

"As a scholar of Islamic art and history, as a talented photographer, and as a decades-long resident of Cairo and Egypt, Bernard O'Kane has fused his multiple beings into providing a visual celebration of Egypt's Islamic architectural heritage. Egypt's Islamic monuments have long played step-sister to their pharaonic antecedents and Professor O'Kane's volume does much to correct the imbalance. . . . Truly a book to delight the eye and intrigue the historian."—Caroline Williams, ASTENE Bulletin

"An encyclopedic, chronological, and relentlessly full documentation of the buildings studied within a large and immersive format. . . . Despite the author's advanced, original, and often primary scholarship, the text remains clear and accessible to experts and novices alike."—Tammy Gaber, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

"The photographs, mostly the author's own, are of especial note, not only beautiful but of academic importance thanks to the recording of fine detail often invisible to the naked eye in the older monuments."—The Art Newspaper

Bernard O'Kane is professor of Islamic art and architecture at the American University in Cairo. He is the editor of Treasures of Islamic Art (AUC Press, 2006) and Creswell Photographs Re-examined (AUC Press, 2009), and author of The Illustrated Guide to the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo (AUC Press, 2012).