There is a restaurant at Seaforth, where you can grab an unpretentious plate of fish or seafood, as well as use the ablution facilities.
When the resulting Museum of Islamic Art opened, it was celebrated as a successful Modernist interpretation of Islamic precedents, from the ablution fountain of the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo to old Islamic fortresses in North Africa.
He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the salat prayer.
At another nearby polling station in a mosque and madrassa complex, voters proceeded smartly from the cardboard voting booths to the ablution area for worshippers, where they set about removing the supposedly permanent ink stains from their right index fingers.
With the cobbler pointing and laughing and his fellow-cobblers starting to join in and pedestrians stopping to see and cars slowing down and mullahs and would-be mullahs frowning at me from the ablution area, I was visited by a familiar embarrassment.
The museum's hard, chiseled forms take their inspiration from the ablution fountain of Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, as well as from fortresses built in Tunisia in the eighth and ninth centuries — simple stone structures strong enough to hold their own in the barrenness of the desert landscape.
