The story
The shrine of an Andalusian scholar at the heart of the neighbourhood named after him.
- 1The shrine of Sidi Jaber al-Ansari
- 2The covered court and arcades
- 3The three doors
According to the Alexandria Governorate’s page, the Sidi Gaber Mosque stands in the neighbourhood named after him, between the tram stop and Port Said Street, facing the Mustafa Kamel Military Hospital. It began as a small zawiya built around the middle of the 7th century AH, which stood unchanged until a mosque was built on its ruins at the end of the 19th century; in 1955 that old mosque was taken down so that the present one could be built in its place.
Read more
Opinions differ on who lies in the shrine beside the mosque; the most likely, the governorate says, is Jaber ibn Ishaq ibn Ibrahim ibn Mohamed al-Ansari, known as Abu Ishaq. Raised in al-Andalus, he moved on to Fez, Tripoli and Cairo, then to Alexandria, where he built a zawiya in the suburb of Raml and lived until his death in 697 AH, past the age of ninety. He was a scholar of Arabic and its grammar; one of his books is “Ijad al-Burhan fi I’jaz al-Quran”.
The present mosque is a square around a central court covered by a raised roof and ringed by arcades, with a women’s gallery above the north arcade. It has three doors: a south door from the tram side, which also leads to the shrine, a north door on Port Said Street, and a west door. It stands about 100 metres from the East District headquarters, according to Masrawy (2023).
The pictures here are old postcards of the earlier mosque, before it was taken down in 1955, not of the present building.
