Li Amadou, an expert on Egyptian art, said in an interview at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

“He never had the chance in his life to be the first artist to do a painting in a mosque, and this is for him the first,” he said. “Even for artists, what he’s doing is quite a rarity.”

Mr. Ibrahim, an engineering graduate, also received a gift of 100 years of the Cairo Museum, part of the museum’s collection of more than 12,000 works.

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Museum officials and artists’ representatives said Mr. Ibrahim’s work would be on display in the mosque for about a year, and that it would receive careful examination and approval before being carried out on the walls.

Mr. Ibrahim’s paintings and drawings are “not very well known when you walk in,” said Nader Al-Zuabi, a Cairo-based art dealer who was among those invited to examine Mr. Ibrahim’s paintings. “We don’t know how big a piece he thinks he’s putting on the wall, but I would say he just hasn’t made it there yet.”

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Even some of the largest Egyptian art museums have had trouble with Islamic art. Abu Hamid El-Salih, the director of the Egyptian Museum, once refused to loan a works by Muhammad Ali Abdel Hamid for a secular museum in the city of Daraya, saying the masterpieces in his collection could never be considered Islam, because the author was not from Egypt.