Sidi Saiyyed Mosque

The Sidi Saiyyed Mosque, at Lal Darwaja beside Bhadra Fort in Ahmedabad's Old City, was built in 1573, the year the Gujarat Sultanate fell to the Mughal emperor Akbar. It is named for Sidi Saiyyed, an Abyssinian noble in the service of the last Sultan, and it never served as a grand congregational mosque; it is a small private-scale place of worship whose fame rests entirely on its decoration. The structure is a simple arcaded building of yellow sandstone, open on its sides, with ten semicircular bays in the rear wall. Two of the western bays hold the celebrated stone jaali screens, carved as intertwined trees whose branches and palm motifs spread across the semicircular panels in an openwork tracery that lets light through while keeping the interior cool. The pattern, often called the Tree of Life, has become the emblem of Ahmedabad and appears on the logo of the city's municipal corporation and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Other bays carry geometric jaali, so that the wall works as a gallery of stone-carving technique rather than a single motif. The plan, with no courtyard and no domes of note, shows the late Sultanate preference for elegant proportion over scale. During the colonial period the mosque was used as a government office and was later returned to religious use and to the care of the Archaeological Survey of India. The building is in a reasonably good state of preservation, although the fine jaali stone remains vulnerable to traffic vibration, pollution and weathering, and the surrounding road junction is busy. The mosque was once hemmed in by streets and shops; recent pedestrian improvements around Bhadra have opened its setting. Visitors can walk inside, view the screens from the prayer area, and circle the exterior, where the carved panels are visible from the garden lawn. It is a short stop, but one of the most photographed monuments in Gujarat.