Pakistan’s most glorious historical monument is the Badshahi Masjid, the quintessential South Asian mosque, its full name, ‘Masjid Abul Zafar Muhyuddin Mohammad Alamgir Badshah Ghazi.’ It was commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir in Lahore in 1671. If someone was to tell a Pakistani to close your eyes and imagine a masjid, this would be it. You would think of domes, pointed arches, and minarets. The Badshahi Masjid is Mughal architecture at its finest, and Islamic architecture at its most South Asian-est.
While much can be said of its fascinating history, this article is about its Islamic architecture. It is important to note that there was a nearly 100 year period of neglect, from 1799, when Ranjit Singh took control of Lahore from the Mughals, to 1863 when the British returned this powerful symbol of strength and piety to Muslim control. Since that time, many leaders and artisans have diligently restored this red sandstone and marble clad beauty to its former glory as one of the largest and most elegant mosques in the world.
Its elegance is a result of 3 important aspects of design: 1- the shapes used by the designer, its forms; 2 – the size of those shapes in relation to each other, its proportions; and 3 – the decorative ornamentation, which enhances each of the previous two aspects. You know it’s done right when you see its silhouette at sunset or walk through its doors. The main forms of the Badshahi Masjid include an elevated entrance gateway to create a sense of awe before you even enter; a vast courtyard with a fountain and tall minarets at the corners to define a sacred boundary from which you can admire the whole mosque; and of course a main mosque building with three domes, small minarets at the corners, and an iwan that invites you to enter.
Let’s discuss the iwan, a large recessed vaulted rectangular space through which you enter the building, often aligned with a central fountain in a courtyard. The Badshahi Masjid’s iwan’s most striking feature is its approximately 21 meters tall central foliated Cusped Arch. The tall arch is framed inside a pishtaq. The pishtaq is a feature of central Asian origin, it sets apart the iwan from the rest of the façade of the building. The Iwan is the best place in Islamic architecture to find muqarnas, a 3-dimensional geometric artform that Muslims developed to ornamentally transition from a flat surface to the point of an arch.
The entire iwan, its pishtaq, its muqarnas, and its cusped arches, are ornamented with delicate, white marble inlayed geometric patterns and arabesques. Arabesques are vegetal biomorphic motifs. They are the main forms of ornament at the Badshahi Masjid. The best example of arabesques in Islamic architecture is often found in spandrels, those triangular spaces in between the curve of the arch and its rectangular frame. Just past its lotus flower mini minarets, the iwan of the Badshahi Masjid is flanked by five arched openings on each side. There are arabesques patterns within each cusped arch opening, painted with subtle hints of color on each geometric curved surface of the muqarnas, every detail adding to its regal, badshahi elegance.
My favorite photos capture the mosque at moments in time when it’s filled with worshipers. The size of the people standing in its vast courtyard, or under its ornate arches, help us to understand its monumental size. It’s a majestic building. Stone and marble panels help to visually break up the massiveness of the building. The ornamental motifs of flowery and leafy interconnected arabesque vines and cusped arches bring a sense of life and visual energy to what would otherwise be cold, hard surfaces. Your eyes dance from one arch to another arch, as you trace the graceful curves of each vine or each cusp of an arch that leads to a point, everything tells you to keep looking upward.
And when you look upward, you see the domes. The Badshahi Masjid has three gleaming onion shaped white marble clad domes, crowned with lotus flowers, and topped with golden finials that reach for the sky. The domes are vivid reminders that this building is related to the Taj Mahal. But it’s not the domes and minarets, nor the magnificent iwan of the Badshahi Masjid that connect it to a larger world of Islamic architecture, it’s the fact that it has Mihrabs. The one architectural element found in mosques around the world, from China in the East or California in the West, is a mihrab. It is a niche, an arched recess, orienting Muslim worshipers towards the direction of the qibla for prayer.
The Badshahi Masjid, as a place to do sajda, is Islamic architecture at its most ISLAM-ic by the literal definition of the word, ‘relating to the religion of Islam.’ But it is also Islam-IC in that it is connected to a larger civilisation created by people who considered themselves Muslims. And now that you have been introduced to what an iwan is, you can begin exploring the Badshahi Masjid’s connection to its Persian and Central Asian cousins in Isfahan and Samarkand and your wonderful journey into a wide world of Islamic architecture can commence. Enjoy!
The writer is an architecture design teacher and an engineering consultant based in Miami, Florida.
