Bhong Mosque

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. You can help by converting these articles into an encyclopaedia-style entry, deleting portions of the kind normally not used in encyclopaedia entries. Please also fill in missing details; put categories, headings and sub-headings; and combine this with other articles on exactly the same subject. Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly on their online archival encyclopædia only after its formal launch. See examples and a tutorial.

Bhong Mosque

Dawn

Mosques By Razia Grover, Lustre Press/Roli Books (Pvt) Ltd

A historicist extravagance with traditional form and decoration, as in the Bhong Mosque, Pakistan

Located in a village of about five thousand inhabitants, the Bhong Mosque in the Punjab region is a work of pure craftsmanship. No architect was employed to design this mosque, modelled on the Mughal architecture of India. It was a labour of love, conceived by a wealthy landlord in 1932 and completed by his son, Rais Ghazi Muhammad, in 1983.

The mosque was planned as part of a larger infrastructural development project for the village, which would include building roads, providing electricity, irrigation and public transport, and generating employment. The mosque and the library occupy an elevated and focal position in the building complex, which includes three large residential areas and a madressah. The house of the founding family of Rais Ghazi is part of the complex. An earlier smaller mosque that stood on the site is now used exclusively for women.

Minaret-towers, capped with jharokhas and cupolas, buttress the mosque on all sides. The actual minaret on the southeast is only two storeys high. Three domes, elaborately ornamented with Multani tile work, surmount the mosque and library. In the profuse ornamentation of both the interior and exterior of the mosque with tile and mirror work, gilding, painting and calligraphy, the craftsmen have excelled in the use of a variety of materials — ivory, onyx, mother-of-pearl and even industrial tiles. The decorative motifs used are equally extravagant, being largely Mughal and Multani but also colonial. The Bhong Mosque reflects the flamboyant visual culture of the region, where trucks and rickshaws, books and clothes display brilliance in colour and design.