15-05-2018
The rough location of
this site is 31°34'9.80"N, 74°18'41.69"E.
The mausoleum of Nila Gumbad houses the remains
of the great mystic Sheikh Abdul Razzaq. He belonged to Mecca city, and came to
Lahore in the reign of Mughal Emperor Humayun (1508-1556). He became a ‘mureed’
of the famous saint Miran Muhammad Shah Mauj Darya Bukhari, who soon realised
that his pupil had powers beyond the ordinary. He called him Sheikh Abdul
Razzaq Makki. His scholarship of the Holy Quran and his pow ers of the occult
attracted a very large following.
Soon he was considered as the leading ‘seer’ of
his time, consulted often by the Mughal court. Abdul Razzaq Makki died in 1084
A.H. and was buried at this place. The Mughal court built him a fine mausoleum,
which still stands as a testimony to the man. Next to the graves they also
built an elegant mosque, which today is known as the Nila Gumbad Mosque.
When the Sikhs came to power, they ransacked the
elegant building of its excellent marble, which they transported to Amritsar.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh ordered that an ammunition dump be made of the mausoleum,
and to one side in the mosque he housed a gun manufacturing facility. To the
western side, among other graves, he built a cannon manufacturing facility.
Thus a majority of the graves of some of Lahore’s leading saints and seers were
destroyed.
When the British came, they removed the arms
manufacturing facility and converted the mausoleum into an eat ery, where
officers of the British East India Company used to have their meals. A bakery
was set up next door, the very first in Lahore. This bakery was owned and
operated by a building contractor called Munshi Najmuddin Thakedar. Once the
cantonment was shifted to Mian Mir, the contractor persuaded the British
authorities to restore the mausoleum and the mosque. He invested in the project
and on his death he was buried to one side inside the mosque.
To the west, just along the alignment where
today exists the Anarkali Bazaar was the grave of Khawaja Saeed Lahori. Next to
his grave were the grave of Haji Abadullah, and a third grave of the nephew of
Khawaja Muhammad Saeed by the name of Abdur Rahman. Next to them is the grave
of Hazrat Shah Sharaf. In an earlier piece I had dwelt on the grave of Shah
Sharaf, who was originally buried at Bhati Gate. When Maharajah Ranjit Singh
ordered that the grave be removed to make way for the expansion of the defences
of the city, his grave revealed a man, buried over 100 years earlier, as fresh.
The famous Fakir Nuruddin got the saint reburied near the Nila Gumbad.
After 1947 the entire area underwent a massive
change, in which new shopping plazas came up. If you happen to walk through the
ba zaar, the building to the south of the old Hindu temple to the east of the
Punjab University, in which a number of clothes shops exists, is where a few
well-known shoe shops exist. If you walk inside the narrow alley of shops, to
one side, under a staircase, is the grave of this famous seer. This is what one
can call a picture of the age in which we live. All the other graves have been
cleared and new shops made on them. Mind you the original grave was built by
Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, an excellent structure the Sikh razed to the ground.
Outside the traffic flows past a fast
deteriorating Nila Gumbad. In the narrow lanes a few graves have been left in
small rooms, mostly unmarked. There is a need to research each one of them. The
lost ones of some great saints need to be located, and if it is possible to
move commercial interest, just let them be known
