Community Helps Beloved Mosque Blossom Into a New Life

After the roof of the Sam ibn Nuh mosque collapsed, the men and women who worshiped there were determined to rebuild on a site where Muslims have prayed for more than 1,000 years.

The shopkeepers and peddlers who make up most of the congregation had little money, though.

And their mosque had little of the historic or artistic merit that usually attracts preservationists. Although it stood on ground long held as holy, it had been built in the 20th century and was barely distinguishable from any of the other plain concrete mosques scattered across Cairo.

But the congregation had a friend: an Arabic-speaking Polish architect working next door on the renovation of a 19th-century stone school and charity house, known as a sabil, built by the founder of Egypt’s last royal dynasty.

A partnership was born. The congregation of Sam ibn Nuh--Arabic for Shem, son of Noah--got help from the architects and engineers gathered from all over the world to restore the sabil of Mohammed Ali. After 17 months of fund-raising and construction, a gleaming new mosque opened late last year.

Agnieszka Dobrowolska, the architect in charge of the U.S.-financed sabil project since 1998, said her relations with the neighborhood had been warm from the beginning.

When she needed to photograph the sabil to document the start of work, she had authority from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to order merchants to pull down stalls they had built against the monument’s walls. Instead, she politely asked, and the merchants politely agreed to move long enough for the photographs to be taken.

“I treated them as friends. We drank tea together,” she said. “When their mosque collapsed, they came to me because they thought I was the only one who could help.”

The area where the mosque and sabil sat was shifting from rising ground water. The experts renovating the sabil were quick to notice and shore up walls and pillars. The congregation, though, knew nothing until June 9, 1999, when the roof collapsed after evening prayers. Worshipers had just left; no one was hurt.

Dobrowolska said records show a succession of mosques had stood at the site and been known as Sam ibn Nuh for at least 1,000 years. Neighborhood legend says the Biblical patriarch’s son is buried under the mosque, but she said there is no tomb and it is unclear how the mosque got its name.

For the rebuilding, Dobrowolska raised about $63,000 from the Dutch government and from the Ford Foundation in New York. The architect, who has helped restore Pharaonic, Roman, Christian and Muslim sites since coming to Egypt in 1993, volunteered her time and expertise.

The congregation raised extra money for lights and other fixtures, volunteered to guard the site at night and helped carry construction equipment during the day. They held prayers amid the debris throughout the rebuilding.

If Dobrowolska’s sabil was a historic monument, the mosque was a living one. She had watched members of the congregation sleep, eat and quarrel in Sam ibn Nuh. She saw one man die in the prayer hall, brought to his beloved mosque by neighbors when he fell ill.

On Fridays at noon, when the main Muslim prayer is held, Sam ibn Nuh draws 600 to 700 worshipers, so many that some spill out onto the street. Caretaker Mahmoud Mabrouk has a practical explanation for its popularity: It’s the only one in the neighborhood with an adjacent bath, where Muslims can perform the ablutions required before prayer in relative privacy.

Dobrowolska said practicality seemed to be the main impulse behind the old mosque’s design. But when she started by designing a series of elegant arches to support a second-floor women’s gallery, members of the congregation asked eagerly that the rest of the new mosque have a similar look.

“I think what I did that was most important was that they started to appreciate the beauty of architecture,” she said.

Dobrowolska borrowed Islamic motifs from a number of places and periods. The finished mosque, though not much bigger than a basketball court, feels spacious under a gently sloping octagonal roof that seems to float over a band of wooden grills that let in light and air.

A row of arches is built of beige and white stone in a striped pattern that looks both medieval and modern. Four marble columns topped by more stone arches support the roof.

It all sits on a foundation engineered to be independent of the treacherously shifting ground.

By chance, two young German craftsmen--in Egypt to fulfill the ancient conditions of their stonecutters’ guild by traveling from town to town to learn from other traditions--turned up a year ago. Working in exchange for meals, Stefan Balding and Sven Walter carved vase-shaped stone pedestals and capitals for the marble columns before wandering off three months later, Dobrowolska said.

Fahmy Antar Ahmed Massar, who has attended Sam ibn Nuh since he was a teenager and these days sells fruit from a wooden cart at its door, says he never doubted the mosque would be rebuilt.

“The house of God never closes, and this was the house of God.”