Jamia Masjid, Shopian

The Jamia Masjid is the historic Friday mosque of Shopian in Jammu and Kashmir. Its origins lie in the Mughal period: Shopian was a halt on the Mughal road over the Pir Panjal, where imperial travellers broke their journeys, and the mosque is said to have been commissioned by the emperor Aurangzeb. Local accounts add that the Banday family of Shopian, among them Ab Rehman Banday, helped pay for the building, though this has not been independently confirmed.

What stands today is largely a 20th-century rebuilding. The foundation stone of the modern mosque was laid in 1944, and over the following few years it went up in local stone supervised by Ustab Habib Ullah Mast, a Srinagar carpenter. The mosque has since been renovated with an eye to keeping its historic and architectural character.