Musalla Complex

The Musalla, “the place of prayer”, was a great religious complex on the northern edge of Herat, in western Afghanistan. It was commissioned in the fifteenth century by Gawhar Shad, the chief wife of Shah Rukh, son of Timur, at the time when Herat was the capital of the Timurid realm and one of the great cities of the Persianate world. Her foundation held a congregational mosque and a madrasa, a college of religious learning, and at the end of the century Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the last great Timurid ruler of Herat, added a madrasa of his own nearby.

What survives today is a fraction of the whole: a handful of tall minarets, standing alone in open ground, and the mausoleum of Gawhar Shad herself. The minarets still carry patches of their glazed tile, lozenges and bands of deep blue and turquoise on the brick. The mausoleum is crowned by a ribbed dome on a high drum, and inside, the inner dome is painted in gold and blue. Gawhar Shad, a patron of architecture from Herat to Mashhad, where her mosque stands beside the shrine of Imam Reza, was buried here after her death in 1457, alongside several Timurid princes.

Most of the complex stood until the late nineteenth century. In 1885, when the Afghan amir Abdur Rahman Khan and his British advisers feared a Russian advance on Herat, the greater part of the buildings was demolished to clear a field of fire for the city's defenders. Earthquakes in the twentieth century brought down more of the minarets that remained. The survivors, some leaning and braced against collapse, have been the subject of repeated conservation efforts, and they remain the emblem of Timurid Herat.