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A man prays facing Mecca inside the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo.
In the 21 years I’ve spent traveling and occasionally living around the world, I will admit to having seen many incredible things. Unsurprisingly, many have been of a religious nature, be they St. Peter’s Basilica in Italy, Wat Phra Kaew in Thailand or the Jagganath Temple in India. But rarely have I ever been as astonished as I was in the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo.
I spent June 4-11 in Cairo, Egypt, for the first-ever Baker Institute Public Diplomacy and Global Policymaking Colloquium. The student conference, a joint project between the Baker Institute and American University in Cairo, was an attempt to combat stereotypes and build cultural and political bridges between our nations. A recent Gallup Poll on the perception of America in the Middle East indicates the importance of measures like ours: Current approval of the United States in Egypt dropped from 27 percent last year to a disturbing 17 percent this year alone. For several days, we worked, discussed and shared rooms together, and got to know each other and our cultures both in the conference room and outside it. Along with that were a number of sightseeing trips, among them a tour of the Sultan Hassan Mosque.
We arrived at the mosque on a bus, and I, in the normal state for jet-lagged people everywhere, was fast asleep. Once out of the air-conditioned refuge of the bus, I stumbled into the nearest shade and saw that I stood in front of a giant stone wall that formed the edge of the mosque. As we walked its perimeter, we learned that the very masonry that reached up to such heights was the same that had once formed the outer lining of the pyramids of Giza. Ahead lay the entrance, flanked by men insisting on bare feet for those about to enter. Inside, the honking horns, shouts and blaring noise of Cairo disappeared, replaced by a world of quiet reverence and contemplation.
We shed our shoes and stepped inside the cool dim halls of the mosque on soft and ornate red carpets. Above us the ceiling was richly, but simply, decorated; high overhead was the dome of the building, ringed with graceful calligraphic inscriptions from the Qur’an. The mosque was empty, and in a sense it made feeling that level of religious connectedness easier. We were alone, save for an imam, whose Islamic songs of prayer echoed through the air.
Outside, the sun shone on the baking masonry of the inner courtyard, making it glow a bright yellow. Inside that incredible place, I stepped away from the group to find myself alone with my thoughts and able to take in both the architectural mastery of the building and the feeling of spirituality that suffused it. Though miles away from Notre Dame and the great European cathedrals, the experience of the mosque was the same — a solemn reverence mixed with a deep, quiet faith.
As I wandered through the halls, I thought about how the mosque made me feel. Growing up, I spent almost every Sunday with my parents at our small Methodist church in Rhode Island, and while nowadays I don’t consider myself overly religious, I do consider myself a practicing Christian. But I would be lying if I said standing in that serene, vast empty space was not a spiritual experience. Even though the other religious places I mentioned in Asia and Europe were incredible in their own rights, none of them affected me as the Sultan Hassan did. Some were more richly decorated, others were larger, but none radiated the serene grandeur that left me awe-struck, and helped me feel the presence of something more than just the work of mortal men.
I’m not sure I could possibly hope to relate the exact way I felt inside to anyone else, even those who were there. But I can strongly suggest that regardless of your religious persuasion, be it Muslim, Christian or anything else, that you never fool yourself into thinking you can only find religion, God or even just a sense of peace in your own halls of prayer. I can assure you that you’ll sometimes find it where you least expect.
Tom Campbell, a rising senior at Rice University, is studying history. This was his first trip to the Middle East.