Jami Masjid, Kotla Firuz Shah (Firuzabad)

Returning from his Bengal campaign of 1353-54, Firuz Shah Tughluq began his own city of Firuzabad on the bank of the Yamuna near the village of Gawin, five kos from Delhi, with the citadel now called Kotla Firuz Shah. ^{4 5 6} The citadel held his congregational mosque, with the "golden minaret", the Ashokan pillar, in front of it. ⁷ The author notes that Afif gives only its name and its place in the citadel; she dates it to AH 755/1354, just south of the pyramidal structure and against the riverside fortification wall, and attributes its building to the vizier Khan-i Jahan and his son. ¹

The mosque stood on a high plinth containing a basement storey (tahkhana) of vaulted cells, prayer taking place on the upper level; it had a single court with cloisters three bays deep on three sides and the sanctuary on the west. ² Its main entrance is on the north instead of the east, because the river ran close to the east wall: a square domed gateway with three outer doorways, originally reached by flights of steps. ² A narrow hidden passage runs inside the thickness of the west wall, and covered staircases and a bridge to the palace let the ladies of the harem reach their upper and lower galleries unseen, an arrangement the author thinks unique among Indian mosques; Franklin, who saw the building in 1793, confirmed this hidden access from the palaces. ^{8 9 3} Franklin described four cloisters whose domed roofs rested on two hundred and sixty stone columns about sixteen feet high, with an octagonal dome in the centre. ^{9 10} A deep pit in the middle of the court is thought to have been a well; an attempt to explore it in 1914-15 was abandoned when its sides collapsed, and it was filled in. ⁹

In AH 769/1367 Firuz Shah brought the Ashokan pillar to Firuzabad and set it on a pyramidal building to the north of the mosque. ¹⁰ Timur records in his Malfuzat that he went into the Masjid-i Jami and prayed there, and Firishta says he admired its design so much that he built a great mosque at Samarqand on the same plan with masons taken from India. ^{1 3} Visitors of the early reign of Akbar left writings on some of its arches, and a date found under the whitewash shows the mosque still in use for prayer in 1741. ³ In 1847 a committee of the Archaeological Society of Delhi investigated it; its plans were lost in 1857. ¹⁰ Today only the north gateway and the north, south and west walls survive. ^{1 2}