Mosques are a space of holistic Spiritual and Social Healing. People from all walks of life visit for spiritual purposes, mental relief, meditation, counselling, etc.
In India, we see a culture of love and solidarity in a mosque where even Hindus visit mosques with various kinds of motivation, including recovery from their pains such as sickness and insanity, Mental peace and overcoming burnout phenomenon, fulfilment of higher ambitions, Study and practice of Islamic Spirituality. Throughout India, we find people waiting at the mosques after prayers for Dua by the Muslims for the cure of ailments of their loved ones.
The complex also holds areas for waiting rooms or hostel facilities for travellers, food for the poor and needy in the form of langar or community food projects.
Reference:
http://macl-ustm.digitallibrary.co.in/bitstream/123456789/2498/16/16_chapter6.pdf
Muslims in India have started a unique social experiment called ‘Visit the Mosque’ or ‘Masjid Parichaya’, an initiative wherein non-Muslims are invited to the mosque and are given introduction about various rituals of Islam like Namaz, Wudu, Masjid introduction.
Reference:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/mosque-invites-non-muslims-to-weed-out-misconceptions/articleshow/71494806.cms
Role in Changing Rural Literacy and Education
Islamic schools established in villages and societies in remote areas of the country have multipurpose roles to play. Through their curriculum, they develop literacy in rural areas. Their particular emphasis on the education and training of girls has uplifted rural education among women.
Some of the Madrasas are exemplary in India regarding religious and modern education. Many have Engineering Colleges, Graduation Colleges, Pharmacy Colleges, Colleges for BUMS and BHMS, and Dental Colleges.
One of the Madrasas in India is unique for establishing a medical college in India, Jamia Islamia Ishaat-ul-Uloom Trust, which runs under the umbrella of education institutions along with Madrasa.
The above example is from Maharashtra, Jalna District, where the medical college is situated. It provides all its medical facilities to its patients free of charge. The institution has been serving irrespective of the caste or religion of the beneficiaries.
A similar Madrasa affiliate to the same trust has an array of educational institutions attached to it, positively impacting the Village economy. Let’s take a case study of the institutions in the Kunjkheda Village, Kannad Taluka, Aurangabad District in Maharashtra. Apart from being a Madrasa, it also includes a pharmacy college, a junior college, a school for girls up to higher secondary, and a Unani college.
The economy of the surrounding villages is agrarian. The students who have studied in these colleges have gone on to secure jobs in the institutions and around along with their agriculture profession. According to the college’s principal, the students of around 54 villages work with the institutions in various capacities and have entirely changed the Economic Conditions in these villages.
Reference: https://www.facebook.com/www.iimsr.net/
Countering the Narrative of Temple destruction
The nature of modern filters that guide our interpretation of premodern political conduct in India from such a biased perspective. Why is it that iconoclasm and temple desecration is so universally associated with Muslims in our history textbooks and the popular imagination? Why are we so universally uninformed about the more general phenomenon of temple desecration? We take a journey to find not only answers but also solutions to these tough questions. First, we take a look at Islam’s view on places of worship of other religions.
Islam gives protection to all places of worship
What does the Quran say?
The principle laid down by the Quran regarding the sanctity of religious places of other religions is explicit and clear. Allah mentions in Surah Hajj Ayah 40:
“Those who have been driven unjustly from their homes only for saying, ‘Our Lord is God.’ If God did not repel some people by means of others, many monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, where God’s name is much invoked, would have been destroyed. God is sure to help those who help His cause – God is strong and mighty.”
Thus, it is clear that Islam values freedom of religion and mandates the protection of places of worship of even enemies during war.
THE DOME and THE SHIKHARA
Muslims have been integral to South Asia for over a thousand years. Why is it so hard to define them as “indigenous”? Why are they not as seamlessly Indian as Sikhs, who have been there for less time, or as Jains, who have been there longer but in fewer numbers?
Part of the difficulty lies with the stress on Islam and Hinduism as religious worldviews. Not only are Islam and Hinduism seen as alternative belief systems, but they are deemed competitive and irreconcilable in their differences. To open up the space between reductive religious orientations and mobile collective identities, one needs a new vocabulary not restricted to modern connotations of words such as Muslim and Hindu.
Mapping Hindu-Muslim identities through mosques
This section examines the dynamics of Mandir and masjid construction in predominantly Muslim or Hindu cities. How Muslims in what were predominately Hindu cities or cities constructed by Hindu rajas, and how Hindus in seemingly Muslim cities expressed their own religious identity through structures.
Example 1:
Little is known about temples in North India built after the Muslim conquest of Delhi; attention tends to be drawn to Islamic monuments, often on those parts constructed from Hindu temples, thus skewing our perceptions of Muslim relations with India’s majority population. A rare statement of political victory – for example, the use of temple pillars in Aibek’s Jami mosque in Delhi – is seen as a universal Muslim mode of building in India. Archaeological reports repeatedly present mosques that are claimed to consist of elements from destroyed (read wantonly) Hindu temples. Yet examining these monuments at the site – for example, the Jami mosque at Kannauj, which is widely believed to be constructed from reused material – could go a long way in dispelling that view.
Reference:
This view was published in 1891 by A. Fuhrer, The Monumental Antiquities and Inscriptions in the Northwestern Provinces and Oudh, vol. 12a of the New Imperial Series, Archaeological Survey of India (reprint ed., Varanasi: Indological Book House, 1969), 21, and also by James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1910), 68.
Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, Edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, University Press of Florida.
Example 2:
Another example is the Junagadh mosque, built in 1286-87 by the chief merchant and shipowner Abul Qasim Ali al-Idhaji. It has a prayer hall, columns with flagged supports for the brackets that hold up the roof lintels, and the mihrab, semi-circular in plan and with a semi-circular arch. The decorative elements framing the mihrab may be later additions put together from abandoned Buddhist remains in the area.
Reference: Mehrdad Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture of South India, plate 1.10, Page 28-29.
Example 3:
One more such example adds one more outlook to the Masjid-Mandir construction dynamics. The issue is not political but architectural. Bhadreshvara is now a small village, but it was a fortified port in ancient times. The Sanskrit sources such as the Jagaduchitra and a local chronicle record that in the 11th and 12th centuries, the town was an independent city-state run by a council of Jain merchants and was under the protection of Chalukian rulers of Gujarat. The Muslims built a mosque and a shrine there. Both have unique architecture and styles and speak completely different stories.
The shrine has an inscription mentioning a certain Ibrāhīm and bears the date Dhi’l-Ḥajja 554/December 1159-January 1160. This is the earliest Islamic-dated inscription in situ in the subcontinent, making the shrine almost half a century earlier than the Quwwat al-Islām and Aṛha’i din kāJhoṅpra. The shrine is a square domed chamber with a single miḥrāb in the qibla wall and has an entrance (porch) on the eastern side, in front of the entrance. The entrance has a flat roof, while the chamber is roofed with a corbelled dome, pyramidal from the outside, finely carved on the inside with lotus motifs and built like the corbelled domes of a Jain temple.
Bhadreśvar, the Solahkhambī Masjid, plan and north elevation.
The mosque has an Arab-type plan with a semi-circular projection for the miḥrāb but is built in the Indian manner with monolithic columns and a flat roof supported by brackets and beams.
In Bhadreśvar, several tombstones are dated between the mid-12th and early 13th century, some scattered around the main mosque, the Solahkhambī Masjid. The mosque itself bears no inscription, but on account of the dated tombstones and the mention of the construction of a mosque in VE 1223/1166 CE in the Sanskrit sources, we can safely suggest a mid-12th century date for the building. The Solah-kharabî Mosque is now half buried in sand and is partly in ruins, but most of the columns, lintels and the entire northern wall still stand.
Reference: Shokoohy, Mehrdad; Muslim Architecture of South India, p 22-25.
The decorative carvings used extensively in the Shrine of Ibrahim and the Masjid are also similar to those found in both Jain and Hindu monuments of western India of the same period. At first glance, its pillars and columns appear like a temple. With keen observation, one has to appreciate the dynamics of building construction, time in history and the availability of resources. Current discourses have distorted these and created a divisive and polemic narrative.
Historically, were labourers and artisans requiring the skills to build these structures available? Especially in an Islamic style as we perceive and see today? Were the artisans trained in constructing Islamic or Persian and Arabic style buildings? Did the Muslim traders have a smartphone or Google to show the Indian artisans what an Arab or Iranian version of a mosque looks like? Was the raw material available on today’s industrial scale to make carvings or pillars of stone? All these constraints help us understand the wisdom behind constructing a mosque or using pillars in Medieval India.