These are the most details I've found outside of the original meme:
"This is a pretty strange story…it’s even more difficult to decipher because it’s not really mentioned in secondary sources, and the primary sources are hard to find in English.
First of all, here is the story according to al-Maqrizi, a 15th-century historian. This is from Description topographique et historique de l'Égypte, a translation of al-Maqrizi into French by Urbain Bouriant (1900), and now translated by me:
“…one day a foreign infidel came looking for the king al-Aziz Uthman ibn Salah ad-Din ibn Yusuf, and convinced him that there was treasure under the small pyramid. They sent stonecutters and a multitude of soldiers, who started demolishing it, and this work took months and months; but they were unable to destroy it and abandoned the task; the money expended and the technical research used for this undertaking were considerable. And today, whoever sees the mass of stones removed from the pyramid would believe that it was completely destroyed, but when looking at the pyramid itself, you see only insignificant breaches. I had the opportunity to see the stonecutters, and I asked their leader if he could put the stones back in place, and he responded, ‘even if the sultan gave us a thousand dinars per stone, it would be impossible.’” (pg. 330-331)
This story is reported by al-Maqrizi, but he quoting the work of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, a very famous 12th/13th century author, who visited Egypt and saw this happening himself. Al-Baghdadi must have been translated into English somewhere, but I’m honestly not quite sure which of his works this story would be in, or where a translation would be.
There is also an English translation of al-Maqrizi by Roland Broadhurst (“A History of the Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt”, 1980), but…it must not be the same manuscript used by Bouriant? I’m not sure what’s going on there but Broadhurst’s translation simply says:
“In the month of Dhū-'l-Hijjah, al-'Azīz determined to demolish the pyramids and remove the stones to Damietta for its fortified walls. But it was explained to him that the trouble of demolition would be vast, and that the usefulness of the stones but small. He therefore changed his decision from the two (large) pyramids to the smaller, which was built from quartz, and its razing was commenced.”
In any case, al-Aziz Uthman tried to destroy the smallest pyramid (the Pyramid of Menkaure), either because he thought there was treasure buried inside, or because he needed to build up the defences of Damietta. Damietta doesn’t seem to make much sense, since that’s far away on the Nile Delta; it was sound strategy to fortify it, since two crusades were eventually launched against Damietta in the 13th century, but it seems unlikely that he would have dragged the stones all the way from Giza (even assuming he would have put them on boats and sailed them down the Nile).
Much more likely, he wanted to use the stones for the fortifications of Cairo. His father Saladin had actually destroyed some smaller pyramids at Giza and repurposed the stones for the Citadel in Cairo.
Another element of this story that I have often heard is that they were trying to destroy the pyramids because they were symbols of polytheism and offensive to Islam, but that’s definitely not the case here. They didn’t actually know who built the pyramids or why; there were lots of stories about them but they were most commonly associated with Biblical/Qur’anic figures, so they weren’t typically considered idolatrous or polytheistic. (One story is still familiar today, that they were granaries built by Joseph.)
So unfortunately I’m not sure what other sources I can point you to. I would almost doubt the story entirely, given the weirdness of the sources, except for the fact that we can still plainly see a gash in the pyramid today...so someone did try to dismantle it…"
