Would you like to make this site your homepage? It's fast and easy...
Yes, Please make this my home page!
the
Imperial or the Badshahi Mosque is across the courtyard from Alamgiri Gate of
the Lahore Fort. The Mosque which is made up entirely of red sand-stone was
built by Emperor Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, in a record time of
two and-a-half years. Its construction was completed by 1674 AD. It has a
beautiful gate-way which measures 21.33 metres in length and a courtyard that
measures 161.5 x 160.6 metres and is said to be the largest mosque courtyard in
the world for outdoor prayers. The marble domes cover seven prayer chambers.
Four lofty minarets stand at the four corners of the mosque, each with an outer
circumference of 20 metres, soaring up to 54 metres. In the chambers above the
Gate of the mosque, are housed relics attributed to the Holy Prophet of Islam
Peace be upon him, his daughter and his son-in-law and are said to have been
brought to the sub-continent by Amir Taimur. Within the Mosque almost all the
colours have been used for painting the floral designs but the overall effect
remains one of sobriety, piousness and simplicity.
the
city next crops up in literature in connection with the campaigns of
the Turkish dynast Mahmud of Ghazni against the Rajas of Lahore between 1001 and
1008. Around this time it established itself as the capital of the Punjab and
thereafter began to play an important and growing role as a centre of Muslim
power and influence in the subcontinent. Its heyday was
the Mughal era from the early sixteenth century onwards and, as Mughal
power began to decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lahore
suffered a concomitant period of ignominy and political eclipse. It was
here, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the Sikh ruler
Ranjit Singh declared himself Maharajah of the Punjab and allowed his
troops to desecrate many of the city's beautiful Islamic shrines- including
the Badshahi Mosque which was, for a while, converted into a powder
magazine. By the time British occupied Lahore in 1849, one writer moved to
describe the city as 'a mere expanse of crumbling ruins'.
