Also known as the New Mosque of Algiers and Fishery Mosque. The mosque is dated to 1660/1070 AH by an inscription over its main entrance portal. The mosque’s Ottoman patronage directs the structure in terms of both planning and ornamentation, but its location within a North African culture retains an underlying influence on the project. The building is unique in its blend of multiple architectural traditions, also incorporating elements from Andalusian and Italian religious architecture that were influential in north Africa at the time.

The mosque’s floor design is forty-eight meters long and twenty-seven meters broad from north to south. The qibla wall forms the southern boundary of the structure, and its longitudinal axis is tilted twenty degrees away from the meridian running north to south. The square mosque is irregularly divided into a grid that is three aisles wide and five bays deep, with the exception of a sixth bay of chambers that flank the main stairway that descends into the mosque. The steps were constructed as the street level increased; at this time, the mosque’s interior ground level is five meters below street level. The interior of the building is divided into eight sections by eight substantial stone piers, each two meters square in plan. The central aisle’s cloister-vaulted ceiling and the side aisles’ gored domes are supported by round arches that are affixed to the tops of the piers. The central vault that the round arches support rises to a height of just over fourteen meters, while the round arches themselves rise to a height of nine meters above the floor at their centres. In comparison to the other five-meter-wide aisles and bays, the centre aisle and the fourth bay are significantly broader, spanning nine and a half meters between the piers. The layout is given a cruciform shape by their enlarged size, evoking previous Ottoman mosque designs from the seventeenth century, which frequently feature sizable domes at the intersection of perpendicular axes.

An eight-meter-tall pointed dome rising from pendentives and a drum with a diameter of around ten meters serve as the intersection’s top features. The dome’s core rises up to a maximum height of 23 meters. The tympana of the blind arches along the outer walls and the drum of the dome both have windows. As is typical of Ottoman mosques, the mihrab and marble minbar are situated right beneath the main dome. A large hypostyle prayer hall in North Africa often has a T-shaped layout instead of the quatrefoil or octagonal Ottoman layouts, with the minbar placed along the qibla wall at one end. The plan of the Mosque, however, departs in at least two important ways from that of traditional quatrefoil Ottoman mosques, such as Sinan’s Sehzade Mehmed Mosque (1544-1549 CE / AH 951-956). In the Algerian example, the Ottoman model’s supporting domes that abut the central dome on all four sides were swapped out for vaulted ceilings on the two opposing sides, and one of those vaulted aisles was further extended by two bays to produce an asymmetry within the prayer hall’s plan that resembles the nave of a European church. With this action, the area that typically serves as an outer forecourt in mosques like the aforementioned Sehzade Mehmed is effectively enclosed.

The interior ornamentation of the building maintains the jumble of architectural traditions; the ornate carvings on the minbar clearly show Italian influences, yet the large horseshoe arch of the mihrab is based on Andalusian models. Although the minbar’s components are all typical of North African minbars, Ottoman tastes may be seen in the use of Italian marble in place of wood. Some academics have proposed that the Mosque’s distinctiveness may be linked to its designer’s lack of acquaintance with specific Ottoman architectural traditions as a result of Algiers’ actual removal from Istanbul, the location of the empire’s capital. The peculiar mosque is a result of a strong blending of Ottoman, North African, and southern European traditions, which may have been influenced by the physical and cultural distance. However, in contrast to the numerous other mosques in the city that faithfully adhered to North African building traditions, the mosque would have unquestionably appeared Ottoman to its contemporaries in seventeenth-century Algiers.