Al-Rifa'i Mosque

This guide to Al-Rifa'i Mosque in Cairo opens with a deposed king dying of cancer in a borrowed palace in July 1980, asking to be buried nowhere but here. From there it traces the mosque's own long, troubled construction, begun in 1869 under Hoshiyar Hanim, mother of Khedive Ismail, and finally finished more than four decades later by the Hungarian architect Max Herz. Along the way it stops at the alabaster columns and Italian marble halls where several of Egypt's own rulers, including Ismail and King Farouk, came to rest.