The Minaret of Jam

The Minaret of Jam is one of the most remarkable and most isolated monuments of the Islamic world: a tall, slender tower of baked brick, some sixty-three to sixty-five metres high, standing in a deep, bare gorge where a tributary meets the Hari Rud (Harirud) river in the mountains of Ghor, in the heart of what is now central Afghanistan, far from any city. It was raised in the 1190s by the Ghurids, a dynasty sprung from these very mountains who rose, on a movement of zeal and conquest, from obscure highland chiefs to rule a great empire that stretched from eastern Persia across Afghanistan and deep into northern India; it was the Ghurids and their commanders who carried Muslim power into the Indian heartland and founded the dominion from which the Delhi Sultanate would grow. The minaret is generally ascribed to the sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad rahimahu Allah, whose name and titles are read in its inscriptions, and is thought to mark the site of the Ghurids' lost summer capital, Firuzkuh, sacked by the Mongols a generation later and never since certainly identified. The court history of the dynasty, the Tabaqat-i Nasiri of al-Juzjani rahimahu Allah, who served the Ghurids and their successors, preserves the memory of these sultans and their building and of Firuzkuh, though it does not describe the tower as such. The minaret's whole surface is sheathed in ornament worked in the brick itself and in turquoise glazed tile: interlacing geometric patterns and broad bands of Kufic and cursive inscription, including the whole of the Qur'anic chapter of Maryam (Mary), Surat Maryam, alongside the patron's name. It was conceived as a proclamation of faith and of victory raised in the wilderness, a masterpiece of the brick architecture of the eastern Muslim world, and it survives, isolated, eroded by the river and long endangered, as the chief witness to a vanished mountain empire. This scene depicts the tower while it is still being built: a builders' yard of moulded brick and glazed tile at its foot, a wooden lifting frame against the shaft, craftsmen laying the upper courses, and a party of riders coming up the valley toward the works. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the panorama is a reconstruction of the building moment, not a record of the surviving ruin.