Blue Mosque of Mazar-i Sharif
The Blue Mosque — the Shrine of Hazrat Ali, known in Dari as Rawze Sharif, "the Noble Tomb" — is the great tiled sanctuary at the heart of Mazar-i Sharif, the northern city that takes its very name from it. Afghan tradition holds that Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet and first imam of Shia Islam, lies buried here rather than in Najaf, and the shrine draws pilgrims from across Afghanistan and beyond.[1][2]
A tomb revealed in a dream
Popular tradition relates that Ali's followers buried him in secret near Balkh for fear of his enemies. In the early twelfth century — one account says a local mullah dreamed the tomb's location; another says four hundred notables of Balkh dreamed it on the same night — the site was revealed, and in 1136 the Seljuk sultan Sanjar raised a shrine over it. That structure was destroyed when Genghis Khan's Mongols sacked Balkh around 1220, reportedly digging for treasure beneath it.[2][3]
Rebuilding and rulers
The shrine that stands today was built in 1480–81 by the Timurid sultan Husayn Bayqara, whose lavish endowment turned a pilgrimage stop into a growing town. By the time of the first European travelers in the nineteenth century the place was simply called Mazar-i Sharif. Under Amir Sher Ali Khan the city rose to prominence: a Shiite governor beautified it with a rectangular square laid out as a chaharbagh around the shrine, and Sher Ali himself restored its tiling in the 1860s — the blue glaze seen today is largely the heir of those renovations and twentieth-century repairs. The tombs of Wazir Akbar Khan and Sher Ali himself stand beside the shrine.[4][5]
The building
Roughly rectangular at about fifty-three by thirty-eight metres, aligned northwest to southeast, the shrine rises in blue-tiled domes — the prayer hall's about ten metres across, the tomb chamber's some fifteen — above a jagged parapet line of turrets and portals. Its surfaces are covered entirely in polychrome tile mosaic dominated by blues; inside, original Timurid squinch-net vaulting survives, though much epigraphic decoration dates from the nineteenth century. The treasury keeps a marble slab from the Seljuk shrine inscribed "Ali, Lion of God."[1]
Pilgrims, pigeons, and Nowruz
For the forty days after Nowruz the shrine hosts Afghanistan's greatest religious gathering: tens of thousands of pilgrims fill Mazar-i Sharif, including visitors from Iran, and it is here that the new year opens with the raising of the janda banner. The complex's famous white pigeons carry their own legends — every seventh bird is said to hold a spirit, and a grey pigeon that visits is believed to turn white within forty days.[4][3]