Sambodhi 2011 Vol 34

Author(s): Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 44

The Minarets of the Hilāl Khāṁ Qāzi Mosque, Dholkā
M. A. Dhaky
The medieval Gurjaradeśa—Gujarāt of our times,—was the province where Islām entered at an earlier date, in fact much prior to the Muslim conquest of 1298. The advent of Islām in Gujarāt, at that early date, was peaceful. As a result, the sacred buildings of Islām in India, earlier than those in Delhi and Ajmer, were built on the soil of Gujarāt. The Sadre-e-avval or Jāmi Mosque in Cambaya was founded before the 12th century and traditionally is held of a date as old as the late eighth century. After Maḥmūd of Gazana's invasion on Somanātha (A.D. 1026), as an inscriptional record reports, a mosque was founded in Āsāpalli* in 1053.5 One other early mosque is said to have been built in Bharuch', in about 1066.' And in Bhadreśvara (anc. Bhadrāvatī) in Kutch were built two mosques (one of c. late 11th century and the other of the 3rd quarter of the 12th century and the third, plausibly a mausoleum there, was built in c. late 12th century.)*
Posterior in date to Delhi buildings but still in pre-conquest era were built two mosques, one founded in Prabhāsa-Pātan,& in 1264, the other at the northern outskirts, Junāgadh, in 1286-87,10 both of these in the Saurāsra sector of the Gujarat State. And, as the later Jaina sources noted, Vastupāla, the Prime Minister of the Vāghelā Regent Viradhavala, who was in the ministerial office between 1220 and 1235, had built mastitis i.e., masdjids for the benefit of the Muslim populace. 11 In the Jagaducarita,-a biography of the illustrious Jaina tradesman Jagadu sāha of Bhadreśvara written by Sarvānanda Sūri in the latter half of the 13th century, it is stated that Jagadu sāha founded a masiti, very probably in Bhadreśvara.12
The discovery of a fragmentary passage in the vastuśāstra Jayaprcchă-a Sanskrit work on the medieval Maru-Gurjara (i.e. Western Indian) civic architecture (c. first half of the 12th century) concerning the constitutional elements of Rahamāna prāsāda literally temple of Rahmān' (i.e., mosque) 13-proves that, in that age, the buildings sacred to Islām were built in number and size that compelled a Brahmanical work on architecture to take mosque's cognizance. All of the earlier Gujarāti mosques, excepting the Bhadreśvara and the Junāgadh ones, have disappeared.