Mosque Architecture of Pre-Mughal Bengal

Mosque Architecture of Pre-Mughal Bengal is by Syed Mahmudul Hasan, a postgraduate teacher of Islamic history and culture at Dacca, and grew from a University of London thesis supervised by K. de B. Codrington, "Development of Mosque Architecture with special reference to pre-Mughal Bengal"; University Press Limited published it at Dacca in 1979. ^{3 4} His interest began in 1957, when as a student he visited the sites of Gaur and Hazrat Pandua. ⁴

After two chapters on the origin and evolution of the mosque, the author divides the mosques of pre-Mughal Bengal into four types: vault-and-domed (the Adina and Gunmant mosques), square domed (Chamkatti, Rajbibi, Lattan), oblong multi-domed, subdivided by the number of aisles and the presence of a front corridor (from Dhunichak and Zafar Khan's mosque to the Great Golden Mosque), and the hut-shaped or curvilinear type (the Saith Gumbad at Bagerhat, Darasbari and the Small Golden Mosque). ^{5 6 1}

The author takes Zafar Khan's mosque at Tribeni (AH 698/1298) as the oldest surviving mosque in Bengal and the prototype of the oblong multi-domed type, and holds that the reuse of temple fragments was a matter of expediency, since no mosque plan was ever laid over a temple plan. ^{1 7 8} He stresses the four-sided curved chau-chala roof taken from the Bengali hut as the Bengal school's contribution to architecture, one that passed into Mughal building. ^{9 10} The raised women's gallery (zenana) he finds a constant feature of Bengal mosques from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. ¹¹