Fīrūz Shah in the fourteenth century, and under the Sharkī dynasty in the fifteenth, when it formed an independent Musalman State, it became famous as a seat of Islamic learning especially remarkable for its tolerant attitude towards Hindusim.
The Muhammadans began at Jaunpur, as they did at Delhi and elsewhere, by using the materials provided by the Hindu temples they destroyed. The buildings erected afterwards under the enlightened Sharkī Sultans are eloquent of the spirit of the Musalman colleges of Jaunpur, for they show an interesting and original synthesis of Hindu and Muhammadan structural ideas which had its parallel in the attempt made by Husain Shah, the Sultan of Gaur, to found a religious cult called Sātya-Pir, with the object of uniting Musalman and Hindu in divine worship.[1] The imposing propylons of the mosques, in which arch and bracket are combined most skilfully, are adaptations of the Hindu temple gopurams. From a technical point of view, it is interesting in these early Indo-Muhammadan buildings to observe the various experiments made by the masons in arch-construction. There is no sign that they were working under expert foreign guidance; evidently every mason had his own ideas on the subject, and was allowed to work in his own way provided that he conformed to the building ritual of Islam dictated by the mullahs or by the officers of the court under whose orders the builders were placed.
Contemporary with the Jaunpur school was the Muhammadan school of Gujerat, established under a dynasty which threw off allegiance to the Delhi Sultanate at the end of the fourteenth century. The founder of it, Muzaffar Shah, was the son of a
- ↑ Satya-Nārāyana was the name under which Vishnu was worshipped in Bengal. Pir was the Arabic synonym for the Supreme Spirit.
