Badshahi Mosque

• 1. Introduction

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  The Badshahi Mosque rises from the edge of Lahore's ancient Walled City, its red sandstone walls catching the light across a courtyard large enough to hold one hundred thousand people at prayer. Built between 1671 and 1673, it was the largest mosque of the Mughal era. Yet the emperor who ordered it was, by the accounts of history, not much interested in building at all.

  Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal emperor, was a military man. He spent the bulk of his reign pushing his armies southward, and the mosque he commissioned in Lahore was built specifically to mark those campaigns. What happened to it afterward, in the hands of Sikh kings, British officers, and finally the citizens of a new nation, is a story of a building that survived occupation and cannon fire to become something its builder never quite intended: an icon.

• 2. A Military Monument

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  Aurangzeb commissioned the mosque in 1671 as a direct commemoration of his military campaigns in southern India, and most particularly his wars against the Maratha ruler Shivaji. The choice of location was deliberate. The mosque was placed directly opposite the Lahore Fort, facing its Alamgiri Gate, which Aurangzeb had built at the same time as the mosque itself.

  Oversight of the construction fell to Muzaffar Hussein, the emperor's foster brother and the governor of Lahore, who held the title Fidai Khan Koka. After just two years of work, the mosque opened in 1673 or 1674.

  Aurangzeb departed from the architectural tradition that had shaped Lahore's earlier mosques, most notably the Wazir Khan Mosque with its intricate kashi-kari tilework in the Persian Kashan style. Instead, he looked to Shah Jahan's Jama Masjid in Delhi as his model, borrowing its combination of red sandstone and white marble inlay. He then built the Badshahi Mosque at a scale larger than that Delhi predecessor.

  The mosque's full formal name, inscribed in inlaid marble above the vaulted entrance, is Masjid Abul Zafar Muhy-ud-Din Mohammad Alamgir Badshah Ghazi.

• 3. Stones, Domes, and Courtyards

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  A flight of 22 steps leads up to the main gate, which sits on a raised plinth. The two-storey gateway of red sandstone is decorated with framed and carved panelling on each of its facades, and features a muqarna, an architectural element originating in the Middle East that had first entered Mughal architecture through the nearby Wazir Khan Mosque.

  Beyond the gate, a sandstone-paved courtyard extends across 276,000 square feet, enclosed by single-aisled arcades. When used as an Idgah, an open-air site of congregational worship, it can hold one hundred thousand worshippers at a time.

  The prayer hall itself accommodates ten thousand worshippers. Three marble domes crown the hall, with the central dome the largest of the three, flanked by two smaller ones. At each corner of the prayer hall stand four smaller minarets. At each corner of the broader mosque complex rise four octagonal, three-storey minarets of red sandstone, each 196 feet tall, with an outer circumference of 67 feet and an inner circumference of just 8.5 feet, and each topped with a marble canopy.

  The carved white marble that covers both the interior and exterior features a floral design characteristic of Mughal art. These carvings have been described as uniquely fine and unsurpassed works of that tradition.

• 4. Stables, Soldiers, and Guns

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  On the 7th of July 1799, Ranjit Singh's Sikh army took control of Lahore. The new maharaja put the mosque to immediate practical use: its courtyard became a stable for army horses, and its eighty small study rooms, known as Hujras and ranged around the courtyard, became quarters for soldiers and storage for military supplies.

  In 1818, Ranjit Singh constructed a marble pavilion in the adjacent Hazuri Bagh garden, known as the Hazuri Bagh Baradari, which he used as his official royal court of audience. The marble for it may have been taken from other Lahore monuments. When Ranjit Singh died in 1839, his son and successor Kharak Singh began building a samadhi, a memorial tomb, for his father on a site next to the mosque.

  The Sikh era brought the mosque into active military conflict. During the First Anglo-Sikh War in 1841, Ranjit Singh's son Sher Singh positioned light cannon, known as zamburahs, atop the mosque's tall minarets. He used them to bombard the Lahore Fort, where supporters of Chand Kaur had taken refuge. One bombardment destroyed the fort's Diwan-e-Aam, or Hall of Public Audience. A French cavalry officer named Henri de La Rouche, serving in Sher Singh's army, used a tunnel between the mosque and the fort to store gunpowder.

• 5. British Garrison to Sacred Space

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  In 1849, Britain seized Lahore from the Sikh Empire and the mosque became part of a military garrison once more. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, British authorities demolished the eighty cells built into the walls surrounding the courtyard, fearing they could shelter anti-British activity. Open arcades, called dalans, replaced them.

  Muslim resentment at the continued military use of the mosque led, with the assistance of Khan Bahadur Nawab Barkat Ali Khan, to the establishment of the Badshahi Mosque Authority in 1852. The body oversaw restoration work and aimed to return the building to religious use. Four years later, in 1856, John Lawrence, then Chief Commissioner of the Punjab Province, formally handed the mosque back to the Muslim community.

  In April 1919, in the weeks after the Amritsar Massacre, a mixed crowd of Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim protesters estimated at between 25,000 and 35,000 gathered in the mosque's courtyard. A speech by Gandhi was read aloud at the gathering by Khalifa Shuja-ud-Din, who would later serve as Speaker of the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab.

  Serious restoration work began in 1939, when Sikandar Hayat Khan, then Premier of the Punjab, led a fundraising effort for the mosque. The renovation was directed by the architect Nawab Alam Yar Jung Bahadur. Khan's role in the restoration was considered so significant that he was buried beside the mosque in the Hazuri Bagh.

• 6. Independence and World Stage

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  Pakistan's independence did not interrupt the restoration that Khan had begun. Work continued from 1939 through to 1960, when it was completed at a total cost of 4.8 million rupees.

  On the 22nd of February 1974, the mosque served as the setting for Friday prayers during the Second Islamic Summit, held in Lahore. Thirty-nine heads of Muslim states prayed there together, among them Pakistan's Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Saudi Arabia's Faisal, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and Kuwait's Sabah III Al-Salim Al-Sabah.

  In 1993, the mosque was added to a tentative list as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Repair of the marble inlay in the main prayer hall followed in 2000. When replacement work on the red sandstone tiles covering the mosque's large courtyard began in 2008, the stone was imported from near Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan, the same region that supplied the Mughal builders more than three centuries before.

  Near the mosque's entrance stands the tomb of Muhammad Iqbal, the poet credited in Pakistan as the intellectual founder of the movement that led to the country's creation as a homeland for the Muslims of British India.