Jamia Masjid

Jamia Masjid in the Nowhatta neighbourhood of the old city of Srinagar is the largest historic mosque in the Kashmir Valley and one of the architecturally most distinctive mosques in northern India. The mosque was originally built in 1394 under the Shah Mir Sultan Sikandar of Kashmir and was substantially rebuilt several times over the following centuries — most extensively by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1672 after a devastating fire — with each reconstruction faithfully reproducing the original architectural design. Unlike the dome-and-minaret silhouette typical of South Asian mosques further south, Jamia Masjid Srinagar is built in the distinctive Kashmiri religious architectural tradition: a square plan with a central open courtyard surrounded on all four sides by colonnaded prayer halls supported by three hundred and seventy carved deodar cedar pillars (each made from a single tree trunk and rising over six metres), and roofed in stepped pagoda-style pyramidal towers covered in green-painted wooden shingles rather than domes. The pyramidal central tower over the qibla side rises approximately twenty-one metres above the courtyard. The mosque accommodates approximately thirty-three thousand worshippers and serves as the principal congregational mosque of the Srinagar Sunni Muslim community for Friday prayers and the major Islamic occasions. The mosque has at times been at the centre of major political events in Kashmir.