Mughal
The Badshahi Mosque and the Fatawa-i Alamgiri
Aurangzeb's mosque at Lahore and his code of Hanafi law, 1673
1084 AH / 1673 CE
Educational historical reconstructionWhere
Badshahi Mosque, Lahore
31.5880, 74.3107 · View on OpenStreetMap
Background
In 1673 (1084 AH) the Badshahi Mosque, the Imperial Mosque, was completed at Lahore for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (rahimahu Allah), who reigned under the title Alamgir, Seizer of the World. Built under his foster-brother and governor Fidai Khan Koka, it was for long one of the largest mosques in the world, raised on a high plinth beside the Ravi with a vast walled courtyard, a prayer hall of red sandstone faced in white marble, three swelling marble domes and four tall minarets at the corners. Aurangzeb is remembered in the Sunni tradition as a pious, austere and Shariah-minded ruler, in deliberate contrast to the religious experiments of his great-grandfather Akbar. Among the works of his reign was the compilation of a vast and authoritative digest of Hanafi jurisprudence, the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, also known as al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya, the Indian Fatawa. Assembled between about 1667 and 1675 by a board of leading South Asian Hanafi scholars under the direction of Shaykh Nizam al-Din Burhanpuri (rahimahu Allah), and funded by the emperor, it gathered and ordered the settled positions of the Hanafi school into a single reference, and it remained in use as a standard of Hanafi practice across India, the Ottoman lands and beyond into modern times. Aurangzeb's long reign and his religious policy, including his reimposition of the jizya and his conduct toward non-Muslim subjects and rivals, are matters of vigorous debate among modern historians, and the picture is more complicated than either the pious portrait or its hostile mirror. This scene sets the two great religious monuments of his reign side by side: the newly finished mosque at Lahore, and the board of jurists at work on the code of law that carried his title.
What you see
A vast congregational mosque of warm red sandstone stands on a raised plinth above a river city in the Punjab, its main facade picked out in white marble. The scale is imperial, a courtyard able to hold tens of thousands.
Three swelling white marble domes crowned with lotus and metal finials sit over the prayer hall, and four tall red sandstone minarets with marble cupolas stand at the corners of the courtyard. This is the Mughal grand-mosque type, not an Ottoman lead dome or a Persian tiled dome.
The prayer hall opens through a great central arched portal flanked by ranks of cusped, multifoil arches, and small domed kiosks line the parapets. The cusped arch and the marble-on-sandstone inlay are the signature of the high Mughal style.
In the foreground, ranks of turbaned jurists sit at low desks with bound volumes and loose folios, writing and conferring. This is a board of scholars at work, not worshippers at prayer.
Stacked legal folios, bound digests of jurisprudence, reed pens and inkpots cover the desks, the apparatus of a great compilation of law being assembled and copied.
The pairing of a newly finished imperial mosque with a board compiling a code of religious law presents the ruler as a patron of the Shariah and of Hanafi jurisprudence, a deliberate contrast with the religious experiments of his great-grandfather.
Further reading & cross-references
Saqi Musta'id Khan, Ma'asir-i Alamgiri (early 18th c.): The official chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign. Used for the imperial patronage of the mosque and the law compilation and for the religious tenor of the reign. Court source, so handled with the usual caution. Confidence high for the events.
Al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya (al-Alamgiriyya) (compiled c. 1667-1675, extant): The legal compilation itself, the primary witness to the project depicted, its Hanafi content, its arrangement and its scholarly authorship. Confidence high.
Khafi Khan, Muntakhab al-Lubab (early 18th c.): Independent Mughal history of the reign; cross-check on chronology and on the more critical readings of Aurangzeb's policies.
Catherine B. Asher, Architecture of Mughal India (Cambridge, 1992): Used for the design, scale, materials and dating of the Badshahi Mosque and its place in late Mughal architecture.
Alan M. Guenther, Hanafi Fiqh in Mughal India: The Fatawa-i Alamgiri (in India's Islamic Traditions, ed. Eaton, 2003): Modern academic study of the compilation, its board of scholars, its sources and its later authority. Confidence high.
Standing fabric of the Badshahi Mosque (extant): The surviving mosque constrains the reconstruction: red sandstone with marble inlay, three marble domes, four minarets, the great courtyard and gateway. Reviewers should keep the 1673 state, without the later Sikh-period alterations or modern additions.
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