The Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha, Cairo Citadel. Built between 1830 and 1848, the mosque has a pure central-domed plan with two slender pencil minarets. Its surface articulation contrasts sharply in its eclecticism with its structural straightforwardness. The mosque is a rhetorical composition designed to emulate the early style of royal Ottoman mosques of Istanbul. The initial design of the mosque by the French architect Pascal Coste was to apply a neo-Mamluk style. Coste designed two mosques for Muhammad Ali: one in Alexandria and the Citadel mosque. Neither was ever built.