Badshahi Mosque

Stand at the western gate of Lahore Fort in 1672 and you are looking at the largest building site in the Mughal Empire. Thousands of workers are cutting and carrying red sandstone, four minarets are climbing inside timber scaffolds, and in the centre the formwork for three white marble domes is going up. The emperor Aurangzeb has given his foster brother Fidai Khan Koka, governor of Lahore, a single instruction: build the biggest mosque the empire has ever seen. The whole thing is finished in 1673, a startlingly short time for a Mughal building of this size. Even the gap between fort and mosque is part of the design. The emperor will be able to walk from his palace gate into the prayer courtyard in a few hundred steps.

The Son Of The Man Who Built The Taj

Aurangzeb was the son of Shah Jahan, the emperor of the Taj Mahal, and he took the throne by imprisoning his father and defeating his brothers. The father's taste ran to marble, inlay and gardens; the son's was austere. The Badshahi, the "Imperial Mosque," gets its effect from scale rather than detail. The courtyard can hold around a hundred thousand people. Each minaret rises about 54 metres. The prayer hall's facade is red sandstone with white marble inlay, modelled on the Friday mosque Shah Jahan built in Delhi, but deliberately bigger. When it opened it was the largest mosque in the world, and it kept that title for more than three hundred years, until the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad was completed in 1986.

In a chamber above the gateway, relics said to have been brought by Aurangzeb are displayed: objects attributed to the Prophet and his family. Their authenticity is debated, but the point is that the mosque was always meant to be more than a prayer space. It was the dynasty's statement of piety, built in stone at a scale nobody could miss.

Fifty Years As A Stable

After Aurangzeb died in 1707 the empire came apart quickly and Lahore changed hands repeatedly. In 1799 the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh took the city and made it the capital of his kingdom. For the mosque this had one simple consequence: it stopped being one. The courtyard became a cavalry stable, the prayer hall a magazine for powder and shot, the side rooms barracks. In 1818 Ranjit Singh laid out the Hazuri Bagh garden in the space between mosque and fort, with a marble pavilion at its centre whose marble is said to have been stripped in part from Mughal tombs around the city.

In 1841, in the succession struggle that followed Ranjit Singh's death, his son Sher Singh besieged the fort and had light guns hauled up the minarets to fire down on his rivals inside. The tallest points in Lahore had been built for the call to prayer; that year they were artillery positions. An earthquake the previous year had already damaged the pavilions at the top of the minarets, and nobody had been in a hurry to repair them.

The British took the Punjab in 1849 and at first simply continued the arrangement, using the building as a garrison and arsenal. Protests from the city's Muslims accumulated until in 1852 a Badshahi Mosque Authority was set up to oversee repairs and the building was gradually returned to worship. The serious restoration only began in 1939 and dragged on through Partition, war and shortage of funds until 1960, when the upper minarets and the dome marble were finally renewed.

The Poet At The Door

Beside the entrance gate stands a small red sandstone tomb: the grave of Muhammad Iqbal, the poet of Urdu and Persian who is counted among the intellectual fathers of the idea of Pakistan. He died in Lahore in 1938, nine years before the country existed. The tomb was completed in 1951 and set on the threshold of the mosque, so that anyone entering an emperor's mosque now passes a poet first. The marble inside came from Afghanistan and the sandstone from India, which means the founding grave of a state whose relations with both neighbours would later sour is built from their stone.

In February 1974 Lahore hosted the second summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Heads of state and delegations from dozens of countries came to the city, and Friday prayers were held in the Badshahi courtyard. In the photographs from that day the leaders of a very different world stand shoulder to shoulder in a space designed three centuries earlier for one dynasty. The building had changed its purpose again, this time in its own favour.

Today

The mosque is run by the Auqaf Department of the Punjab government and is one of Lahore's principal Friday mosques; on the two Eids the great courtyard actually fills. It has sat on UNESCO's tentative list since 1993 without being inscribed. The threat now is Lahore's air: the city's winter smog is among the worst recorded anywhere, and porous sandstone absorbs it. The garden between the fort gate and the mosque gate is still there, and the few hundred steps an emperor walked are now walked by thousands of people every day.