Blue Mosque

The Blue Mosque (Shrine of Ali) in Mazar-i-Sharif is the most important religious building in Afghanistan and one of the most architecturally distinctive mosque-shrine complexes of the eastern Islamic world. The shrine is venerated by many Afghan Sunni and Shia Muslims as the burial place of Ali ibn Abi Talib — the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the fourth Rashidun caliph — although the mainstream Shia tradition holds that Ali is buried in Najaf in Iraq. According to local Afghan tradition, when Ali was killed in Kufa in 661 CE, his followers placed his body on a white camel and let it wander; the camel collapsed and died at the spot in northern Afghanistan that became Mazar-i-Sharif (literally "the Noble Shrine"), where Ali was secretly buried to protect the tomb from desecration. The current shrine was built by the Timurid Sultan Husayn Bayqara in the late fifteenth century after a local farmer claimed to have rediscovered the burial site, and the building has been progressively restored and expanded over the following five centuries — most extensively in the late nineteenth century under the Afghan emir Abdur Rahman Khan. The shrine is famous for the brilliant blue and turquoise tilework that gives the mosque its name, covering the central dome, the surrounding smaller domes and most of the exterior walls. The shrine is the focus of the Nowruz (Persian new year) celebrations in Mazar-i-Sharif, when a green banner is raised at the shrine and the city receives many pilgrims from across Afghanistan and Central Asia.