The Qutb Complex of Early Delhi

At the turn of the seventh century AH (around 1191-1206 CE) the Ghurid conquest of northern India established Muslim rule across the north of the subcontinent and founded what became the Delhi Sultanate. Muhammad of Ghor defeated the Rajput confederacy at the second battle of Tarain in 588 AH (1192), and his commander Qutb al-Din Aibak, a Turkic slave-general who would become the first sultan of Delhi, set about building the monuments of the new order at Mehrauli, near Delhi. The chief of these is the Qutb complex: the Quwwat al-Islam mosque, the first congregational mosque of Delhi, and beside it the Qutb Minar, a towering victory minaret of red sandstone begun under Aibak and carried up by his successor Iltutmish, ringed with bands of carved Qur'anic inscription. The buildings are a vivid record of conquest and of cultural meeting at once. The mosque's colonnades were built from spolia, carved columns and lintels taken from demolished temples and reused, their dense Indic carving still visible, and its great arched screen was raised by Indian masons in their own corbelled technique rather than as true arches, so that Islamic forms and inscriptions were realised through Indian stone-working. An ancient iron pillar, far older than the conquest, was kept standing in the courtyard. These first monuments of Muslim Delhi thus carry both the assertion of a new power and the deep imprint of the Indian world it had entered. The conquest and its buildings are recorded by the Persian historian Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani in his Tabaqat-i Nasiri and by Hasan Nizami. This scene depicts the complex under construction: the rising red minaret, the great arched screen of the first mosque, the reused temple columns of its colonnades, the old iron pillar in the court, and the ridge country of Mehrauli around, the founding monuments of Muslim rule in northern India, sober in framing and attentive to the meeting of two architectural worlds.