Mosque of Zafar Khan Ghazi, Tribeni

The formative phase of Muslim architecture in Bengal began in the late thirteenth century in the newly conquered areas of Tribeni, Chhoto Pandua and Satgaon in Hooghly district. ^{1 2} Tribeni, a centre of Hindu culture, was conquered by Zafar Khan, military commander of the region under the governor Rukn al-Din Kaykaus (1292-1302), according to an inscription of AH 698/1298. ² The author takes his mosque as the earliest known example of mosque architecture in Bengal, far older than any building at Gaur or Hazrat Pandua. ^{1 2}

The prayer hall is an oblong 76 feet 9 inches by 34 feet 7 inches outside, divided into two aisles by an arcade on four squat black basalt piers, from which longitudinal and transverse arches carry ten domes built of diminishing rings of brick. ³ The qibla wall has five mihrabs, the finest the central one, its multifoil brick arch on slender pillars from a Hindu temple, its terracotta ornament a twining creeper. ³ It is entered by five true pointed arches on the east and doors on north and south, and has no courtyard, fountain, minaret or corner towers. ^{3 4}

Fragments of non-Muslim buildings are built into it, as in the Quwwat al-Islam mosque at Delhi, and R. D. Banerji thought it had been a Vaishnava temple. ² The author, following Dani, answers that its plan is that of an oblong multi-domed mosque with all the elements of a congregational mosque, that a restorer's hand shows in the high dome and the assembled mihrab pieces but not in the original plan, and that reuse was a matter of expediency. ^{2 3 5} Saraswati dated it to the late fifteenth century and Brown to the early sixteenth on the evidence of its plan, a view the author does not accept. ²