Place · sultanate mosque · Bangladesh
Sixty Dome Mosque, Bagerhat
The 15th-century Shat Gombuj Mosque at Bagerhat in Khulna division, Bangladesh, 60 kilometres east of Khulna — the centrepiece of the sultanate city of Khalifatabad founded by Khan Jahan Ali in the 1440s on the Sundarbans fringe. The mosque's name means 'sixty-domed' but actually has 77 domes (sixty on the main hall plus smaller corner domes). The mosque is 50 metres long and 32 metres wide, with 60 slender stone pillars supporting the dome roof. Khan Jahan Ali (1369-1459), the Sufi warrior-saint who converted the lower Bangladesh delta and founded Khalifatabad with over 360 mosques, is buried 500 metres away. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985 as the Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.674, 89.742
Connections (2)
- Architectural modelAdina Mosque, Pandua
Two Bengal sultanate mosque programmes, one monumental and one multiplied: the Adina at Pandua, a single vast hypostyle hall meant to answer Damascus, and the Sixty Dome Mosque at Bagerhat, the centrepiece of a whole mosque city founded on the Sundarbans fringe by Khan Jahan Ali. The Adina asserts an empire; Bagerhat settles a frontier, with a saint clearing forest and building tanks and mosques as he went.
- AnalogueMakli Necropolis, Thatta
Bagerhat on the Sundarbans fringe and Makli near Thatta are the two great deltaic Muslim funerary and settlement landscapes at opposite ends of the subcontinent, both on the edge of a mangrove or a wasteland, both built in brick and glazed tile because there was no stone, and both organised around a saint's tomb and the population that gathered to it. The Indus and Ganges deltas produced the same institution independently.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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