Mahabat Khan Mosque, Peshawar: the Mughal mosque of Andar Shahr

At a glance

• The Mahabat Khan mosque stands on a raised terrace in Andar Shahr, the "inner city" of Peshawar, now the jewellery bazaar. It is named after Mahabat Khan, a Mughal governor under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. [2, 3]

• No inscription gives its date. Dawn writers give 1660 and 1670, a senior officer of the provincial archaeology department gives 1660–70 for the start, and Ahmad Hasan Dani places it in Shah Jahan's style without fixing a year. [2, 3, 5, 13]

• The prayer hall has three fluted domes and two three-storey minarets, and the courtyard has a pond in the middle. The ground measures 30,155 square feet. [3]

• The 1897–98 district gazetteer, written for the British government, records that its two minarets were "used frequently in Avitabile's time as a substitute for the gallows". [1]

• The mosque nearly burnt down with Andar Shahr in June 1898. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa archaeology directorate began restoring it in 2018. [1, 6, 10]

A governor's mosque in the inner city

Peshawar's biggest old mosque is named for a man who was not a Pashtun. Dani, the Pakistani archaeologist whose 1969 book Peshawar: Historic City of the Frontier is still the standard account of the city's monuments, says the builder was Mahabat Khan Mirza Lahrasp, whom the Mughal chronicle Ma'asir-ul-Umara lists, and that he was governor of this region twice, once in the last years of Shah Jahan and again under Aurangzeb. [2] Dani says tradition ties his name to the building and that it is not certain when he built it. [2] He also corrects two earlier writers: S. M. Jaffar had named the builder as Zamana Beg, alias Mahabat Khan, who died in 1634, and Raverty had named a Mahabat Khan the Afghan and the year 1756. Dani says Raverty was probably mistaken, and that the Mahabat Khan Jaffar named belongs to Jahangir's time. [2]

The dates in print differ. Dawn in a 2021 news report and the Express Tribune in 2015 give 1660, and Sher Alam Shinwari of Dawn gave 1670 in 2008 (Shinwari adds that experts "have yet to determine the exact date of its completion in the absence of any epigraphically established details" and that most believe it was finished about 1670, in Aurangzeb's last years). [3, 5, 8] A feature from the provincial archaeology department's own senior research officer, Bakht Zada Khan, says work began in 1660–70 and ended in 1680, with Shah Jahan building a small part and Aurangzeb the larger part. [13] The Friday Times lists 1627, 1630 and 1670 and calls 1670 most likely. [11] The 1630 date there clashes with Dani's reading of the chronicle. Dani himself judges the style to be of Shah Jahan's time and says there is no truth in the idea that the builder left it unfinished. [2]

The mosque is in Andar Shahr, which Dani describes as high ground, cut off from the older, pre-Muslim part of the city by the channels that meet near Chowk Yadgar. Its name and its nearness to the Bala Hisar suggest to him that it once belonged to the citadel. [2] Dani found jewellers' shops and sellers of the Peshawari lungi turban cloth there, and Shinwari calls it the jewellery market. [2, 3] In the account of the city in 1850 that Dani quotes, the bookbinders worked in the bazaar of the mosque of Mahabat Khan and forty-five Hindu bankers and money-changers lived in the street of Mahabat Khan. [2] So the quarter was already a trading street in 1850.

Courtyard, prayer hall and painted walls

Three raised entrances, east, north and south, lead up to the courtyard. [3] Dani says only the south and east doors were in common use in the 1960s. [2] In the middle is the ablution pond. Shinwari counts fifteen low-roofed cells around it, and Dani calls them a single row of rooms down the sides, in the place of the usual arched halls. [2, 3]

The prayer hall fills the whole west side. Dani measures the mosque at 185 by 163 feet, much smaller than the Badshahi mosque at Lahore, and notes that it has no front verandah, only the single hall with a lavishly decorated interior. [2] Five arched openings on the east side open into five compartments, each with a deep arch in the west wall serving as the prayer niche, and the central arch the deepest. [3] There are three fluted domes with gilded finials, and the two minarets stand at the two ends of the hall's eastern front. [2, 3] Shinwari says each minaret has three storeys reached by a narrow stair, and that a chain of low minarets runs along the front. [3]

The interior is painted. Shinwari describes panels of different shapes decorated with mural paintings and floral patterns, with Quranic verses along pillars, ceiling, walls and the dome over the mihrab. [3] The Friday Times describes the same floral and calligraphic work and a restoration craft still practised: the old lime plaster is chipped off, fresh lime laid on, left to dry for some days, and the pattern traced on paper and copied onto the wall. Sajjad Khan, a contractor on the job, told the paper that Mughal-era techniques survive in Lahore and Multan, which is where the department found its craftsmen. [11] Much of the present decoration was renewed in the twentieth century, Dani says. [2]

The minarets under the Sikhs

Peshawar was taken from the Durranis by the Sikh army and governed in 1838–42 by General Paolo Avitabile, an Italian in Ranjit Singh's service (see Peshawar: a short history of an ancient city). The mosque's minarets are tied to his name by several tellings, and they do not agree.

The earliest in print is the gazetteer of 1897–98, written by British officials: the minarets were "used frequently in Avitabile's time as a substitute for the gallows". [1] Shinwari writing in Dawn in 2008 says Avitabile "used to hang a local tribesman each day at the top of the minaret". [3] The Friday Times in 2022 says men were thrown from the minaret and that five a day were hanged after the Sikhs took the city in 1834, which it calls a cruelty that lives on in local folklore. [11] The Express Tribune in 2015 says only "according to some accounts" that the minarets were execution sites. [8] Owais Mughal, writing on the Pakistani site All Things Pakistan in 2008, calls the story unconfirmed, notes that it appears on many websites in identical words, and names no original source. [12] The number a day and the method differ from teller to teller, and none of them names a document.

Peshawaris remembered the man in two ways. An English account of the city in 1850, which Dani quotes at length, says that the Peshawaris called him Abutabile Sahib, that he rebuilt much of the city and widened its streets, and that although he ruled with a rod of iron his name was greatly respected, because he heard every complaint himself and was thought a just man. [2] Both the memory of the hangings and the memory of the roads belong to the same governor. What the sources support is that the minarets were used for executions in his time, on the gazetteer's word, and that the rest is folklore with no source.

Shinwari adds that the mosque was "razed and plundered" under Sikh rule and that local people and later the British rebuilt it. [3] Dani does not describe the damage. [2]

Fire, neglect and the marble floor

The gazetteer of 1897–98 says the mosque "was nearly destroyed during the fire which burnt down the Andar Shahr in June 1898 and was only saved by the unremitting efforts of the faithful". [1] Dani repeats the sentence. [2] Shinwari gives June 1895 and says the fire destroyed the top of the minarets. [3] The gazetteer was printed in 1899 and the earlier year looks like a slip, so the date here is 1898.

The twentieth century was hard on it in other ways. In the 1980s, Dawn reported in 2005, the chief minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao told the Auqaf department to replace the mosque's brick floor with marble. [7] In 1982 the provincial government declared it a historic site and placed it under the Auqaf department, the body that runs religious endowments. [13] Conservators told Dawn that damp followed, that cracks were covered with mortar, and that a section of the north-east corner fell in on 25 June 2004. The project director, Nadeem Ahmed, answered that the marble floor and pond were no threat and that ventilation through the arch openings let to shopkeepers was "just a fiction". [7] Shinwari wrote in 2008 that the renovation of the late 1980s "failed miserably" as the painting began to flake. [3]

Shops did more harm. The Auqaf department rented out the openings at the base, and by 2021 forty-six shops stood inside the perimeter wall and a five- or six-storey commercial plaza had been built against the prayer hall, blocking its drain and its mihrab. A civil engineer told Dawn: "The mosque has been choked. It cannot breathe." [5] Dr Abdul Samad, director of archaeology, said the damage was man-made and reversible with scientific methods and the original materials. [5] The earthquake of 26 October 2015 cost the mosque one of its minarets, insiders told the Express Tribune, and one of the small minarets was damaged beyond repair. [8]

The restoration that started in 2018

The provincial government set aside Rs50 million in 2014–15, and in April 2016 its development working party put the work on hold because the Auqaf department had no conservation skills. [9] In May 2017 it approved Rs87.7 million for the archaeology directorate to do it over three years. [9] The work began on the night of 17 February 2018, when officials started removing garbage dumps and shops at the entrance. Dr Samad said four shops went that night and forty-three owners were told to leave within a month. [6]

It ran slowly. In October 2021 the Express Tribune reported it well behind schedule, three contractors gone and a fourth hired, a dome shaken loose by the earthquake that could not be put back, and an archaeology official's complaint that earlier contractors used modern bricks in ten minarets and changed their design. Parts were built and pulled down again. Residents said only two of ten minarets had been rebuilt, and altered, and that the pond had been demolished. The contractor said two domes and five minarets were done. [10] In November 2021 the provincial government decided to hand the whole mosque to the archaeology department, on the advice of a committee that included the Auqaf and tourism departments. [5]

An undated feature by the Associated Press of Pakistan quotes Bakht Zada Khan saying that work on the minarets, domes and ablution area was sixty per cent complete, that the budget had been raised to Rs160 million, and that the aim was completion by 2024. [13] In March 2025 Dawn reported a calligrapher, Zeeshan Minhas, painting the empty pillars and wall spaces in thuluth script as a volunteer, and said the mosque holds over 4,000 worshippers at once. [4]

A mosque Peshawaris use

The mosque is a place of prayer first. The APP feature says its courtyard can hold 20,000 to 30,000 people, a very different figure from Dawn's. It also records that Professor Ehtisham Qaiser attended the night gatherings of Ramadan there for about ten years. [4, 13]

The same feature says that after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 refugee tribal elders met in the mosque to unite Afghans against the Soviets. [13]

The link to Pashtun history is closer than the builder's name suggests. Dani writes that Khushal Khan Khattak, the poet and chief whom Aurangzeb had imprisoned, was released on the intercession of Mahabat Khan, and calls it unclear why Mahabat interceded. Dani suggests that both men were removed from Peshawar by the governor who replaced Mahabat or by the emperor himself. [2] The break between Khushal and the Mughals came after that. [2] For Khushal's later war see Khushal Khan Khattak: poet and chief and Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier, 1526–1707.