Mosque of Ibn Tulun

This guide to the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo opens around 1300 with Lajin, a sultan's assassin turned fugitive, hiding inside the mosque's ruined spiral minaret while enemies hunt him through the city, and the promise he makes in the dark. It reaches back further to the mosque's ninth-century founder, Ahmad ibn Tulun, a slave's son who ruled Egypt almost as his own kingdom after growing up in Samarra, Iraq, beneath a spiral minaret of its own. Listen for what happens when his builders ask what shape he wants for the tower here.