Al-‘Azabi Family

Description (The direction towards Mecca (Qibla) is described as eastern and other directions are named accordingly)

A sizeable funerary enclosure consisting of an irregular conglomeration of single-storey buildings and courtyards stretching for about 45 metres north to south and about 15 metres east to west. It is hemmed in between neighbouring enclosures, with access only from narrow pedestrian streets. There are 13 rooms by the perimeter walls, taking up most of the lot. The earliest part of the complex appears to be the enclosure in its northern part, measuring approximately 22 x 15 m in plan, with rooms grouped in a U-shape around the courtyard by the eastern wall, with a small secondary courtyard by the western wall in the southern tract of the rooms. The main entrance is in the northern façade, which is built of rubble stone and plastered, and is undecorated save the huge cavetto cornice at the top of the wall, which transitions in a smooth curve from the taller eastern section and the lower western section. There are five undecorated rectangular windows in the façade, with simple iron grilles and simple wooden panelled shutters. The gate topped with a semi-circular arch is built of ashlar stone and undecorated. It leads to a hallway in a residential section with two rooms currently occupied by the keepers. The hallway leads to a courtyard (now used for raising poultry), from which a large square burial chamber on the southern side of the courtyard is accessed. It has an octagonal wooden lantern in its plain, undecorated ceiling, and contains two decorated marble cenotaphs and two decorated limestone tomb markers. Another burial room in this zone has a partially broken ceiling and includes a richly decorated marble cenotaph. There is a small courtyard south of the main burial chamber, and west of it, a plain room which according to a panel on the wall is a shrine to Muhammad Abdelghani, the Shaykh of the Sufi group al-Bayyumiya. The Shaykh’s wooden cenotaph covered with cloth stands inside an extremely simple wooden enclosure. Further south, around two tiny courtyards, are six more plain and undecorated burial rooms, which are in very poor condition, some of them inaccessible due to collapsed rooves.