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About this talk

The Iranians’ Mosque of Bombay, locally known as Mughal Masjid, was built in the 1860s by a Shirazi master mason for the Iranian Shi‘i diaspora community. It remains one of the city’s most prominent Shi‘i places of worship. This talk uses the mosque as a prism through which to explore the social history of this community, while also reconsidering dominant narratives of Iranian architectural history and questioning the stereotype of “the Iranian mosque.” Conceived as a distinctive “garden mosque,” Mughal Masjid evokes Shiraz within the old city of Bombay, while illuminating the social intimacies and tensions among different sectors of the Iranian community, particularly merchant families from Shiraz and Shushtar. Architecturally, its hypostyle, dome-less form offers an innovative representation of the mosque traditions of the southern Zagros region, challenging the stereotype of “the Iranian mosque” as defined by domes and monumental minarets. By foregrounding this diasporic Qajar building, the talk argues that Orientalist scholarship and modern nationalist historiography, despite advancing different narratives, share a deeper meta-narrative and epistemological framework: one that obscures the regional diversity of Iranian architecture and marginalizes the significance of the Qajar period. Dr Reza Masoudi Nejad is an urbanist working across architecture, urban history, and ritual studies, combining archival research with long-term fieldwork in Iranian cities and Mumbai. His work examines the role of religious ritual in urban social history, with particular attention to the ways ritual occasions shape urban negotiations and social transformations. Trained as an architect at the University of Tehran, he completed a second master’s degree in urban morphology and a PhD on rituals and cities at the Bartlett, UCL. His monograph, The Rite of Urban Passage (Berghahn Books, 2018), has been translated into Persian (Arma, 2026). He recently edited a series of papers on Iranian architectural historiography published in Iranian Studies. He is currently a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and was an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 2025–26.

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