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The Mosques of Cairo 171
panelling of its walls, to the richness of its chased bronze
doors.
The courtyard itself is very lovely, with its unrestored
tessellated pavement and its ancient fountain in the most
picturesque stage of decay. On each side of the four great
arches are elegant sunken panels of black and white marble,
showing the barred windows of the four great schools of
Islam. For Sultan Hassan's mosque was the University of
the four sects.^
The tomb of the Imam Shafi, the founder of the Shafai
Order, is in one of the three mosques which it is difficult for a
Christian to enter, and the only one of the three which is a
monument of antique art. It is said to have been built by
Saladin and has some fine antique features, though much of it
is in atrocious taste. The other two forbidden mosques are
those of Seyyida Zeyneb and El-Hassanen. The latter is near
El-Azhar and is built in a semi-European style with valuable
materials and garish effects. You c.in see all you want to see
of it from the door : it is supposed to contain the head of
Hoseyn, the son of Ali, who fell at the battle of Kerbela A.D,
680. Hoseyn and Hassan, like their father Ali, are most
reverenced by the Shia or unorthodox Moslems of Persia.
Seyyida Zeyneb was their sister ; her mosque was only
finished in 1803 and is not in the taste which appeals to the
artistic, so it can be omitted.
At present, like every part of the mosque, the eight
hundred chambers of the University are abandoned, not
to the owl and the bat, but to the Italian restorer and the
' " Sultan Hassan has, it is said, a thousand rooms, two hundred and fifty for
each of the four Orders of Islam, with lecture-halls attached, in which professors
of the Order can lecture to the pupils in the style of medireval Oxford.
"The four tnezhebs, or principal sects, are the Hanafi, the Shafai, the Maliki,
and the Hanbali. These sects differ on points of ritual and as regards the interpretation
of certain portions of the Mohammedan law. The Turks in Egypt
belong to the Hanafite sect. Most of the Egyptians belong to the Shafai, but
some few to the Maliki sect. Below these four main divisions are a number of
Tarikas, or minor sects, which were called into existence at a later period of
Islamism than the viezhebs. Two of the minor sects, the Wahabi and Senussi,
have played a considerable part in recent history, and are noted for their
fanaticism. "—Sladen's Egypt afid the English, p. 373.