The Building of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque

An ancient walled oasis city on the Zarafshan river in Transoxiana, on the western slope of the Pamirs. The high steppes of Central Asia rise to the east. The bare loess hills around the city carry the names of the Companions and Tabi'in who fell here in the Muslim conquest of the 1st AH century; the soil of Samarqand is the soil from which Imam al-Bukhari (rahimahu Allah) came, three centuries before this date.

At the northern edge of the bazaar quarter of the city, a vast new congregational mosque is rising at a scale unprecedented even in the great construction tradition of Transoxiana: a rectangular outer enclosure of perhaps 167 by 109 metres; the great gateway (pishtaq) on the eastern entrance front rising over 35 metres in two towering minarets flanking an enormous pointed arch; the qibla iwan on the western side topped by a vast double dome on a high drum; subsidiary iwans on the north and south sides of the sahn; the whole faced in glazed tile of cobalt blue, turquoise, white, and gold.

The patron is Amir Timur ibn Taraghay Barlas, Tamerlane, Amir of the Timurid dominions of Transoxiana, Khurasan, Persia, and the lands to the west, returned to Samarqand in 800 AH (1398 CE) from his campaign in India which had taken him to Delhi and back with an enormous train of plunder, prisoners, and craftsmen. He has now commissioned the great congregational mosque of his capital, building with materials drawn from across his dominions and craftsmen taken from every great city he has conquered: stone-masons from Tabriz, Shiraz, and Isfahan; tile-cutters from Iran; calligraphers from Persia; stonecutters and elephants from Delhi to haul the great granite columns.

On the ground of the site, the scale is human-impossible: enormous granite blocks the size of carts; mud-brick courses being laid by hundreds of labourers in carefully organised gangs; tile-cutters at low benches preparing the cuerda-seca glazed tiles whose blue colour will be the visual signature of the Timurid building tradition for the next two centuries; calligraphers laying out the great Qur'anic and salawat inscriptions that will band the iwan arches.

The mosque is the visible affirmation of Timur as the Sunni Muslim sovereign of Central Asia in the lineage of the great Muslim conquerors of the eastern Iranian world. Timur is recorded by his court historian Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi (Sunni Hanafi) as a strict Sunni Hanafi by madhhab, a patron of the Sunni 'ulama' of Bukhara and Samarqand, and a builder of mosques, madrasas, and Sufi shrines across his dominions, including the great new shrine of Ahmad Yasawi (rahimahu Allah) at Turkestan, the renewed shrine of Abu Hanifa (rahimahu Allah) at Baghdad after his conquest of the city, and the great shrine of Shah-i Zinda (Qusam ibn al-'Abbas, the Companion who is recorded by the Sunni Samarqandi tradition as having brought Islam to Samarqand in the 1st AH century).

The light is the high silver light of late spring in Transoxiana. The view to the east shows the loess hills of the Zarafshan valley; to the south, the silvery line of the river; to the north, the steppe; to the west across the city, the new mausoleum complex of the Shah-i Zinda on the northern slope of the Afrasiyab, the mound of the pre-Islamic city of Samarqand, where Timur's family and the wives and sisters of his court are building tombs in turquoise tile.

The construction of the Bibi-Khanym is preserved in the Sunni Timurid historical tradition: Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama (the principal Timurid court history), Nizam al-Din Shami's Zafarnama, and Hafiz-i Abru's Zubdat al-Tawarikh. The construction was begun in Ramadan 801 AH and continued for several years; the great dome and pishtaq were complete by the time of Timur's death in 807 AH (1405 CE). The Spanish ambassador Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, who visited Samarqand in 1404 CE, left a detailed eye-witness description of the mosque under final construction.