Rikabi Bazar Mosque

Rikabi Bazar Mosque situated in Tangar village under the Rikabi Bazar union of Munshiganj district, about 4.8 km to the west of the district town, and about 2 km to the west of the famous Baba Adam's Mosque, is a thoroughly renovated building. A masonry verandah has been added in the east. A Bangla inscription fixed over the central doorway of the verandah records that it was restored in 1384 BS.

This is a single-domed square mosque and built entirely of brick, measuring 6.95m a side internally. The walls are about 2.13m thick. There were four corner-towers in the four exterior angles of the building, but these were removed at the time of renovation work. The mosque has five arched-doorways, three in the east and one each on the north and south sides. The north and south doors are now used as windows. All the arches are of the two-centred pointed variety. The central archway in the east is bigger than the flanking ones. Corresponding to the three eastern archways there are three renovated semi-circular mihrabs inside the qibla wall that are set within rectagular frames. Like the central doorway, the central mihrab is bigger than its flanking counterparts. The north and south walls have two alcoves on either side of the archway. The square prayer hall of the mosque is covered with a large brick shouldered dome, which rests on the four blocked arches over the central mihrab and the three axial doorways springing from the brick pilasters, two inside each wall, in combination with Bengali pendentives and half-domed squinches on the upper angles.

An octagonal drum can be seen externally in the lower part of the dome. The parapets and the inner side of the dome is decorated with rows of blind merlons, and each rectangular frame of the three mihrabs is crowned by a frieze of blind merlons. These are not original ornamentations. The outer walls of the mosque were once ornamented with terracotta plaques, but now these are all missing. The mosque is at present covered with cement plaster.

An Arabic inscription, originally fixed over the central archway of eastern wall, can now be found fixed to an enclosure wall of a nearby newly built mosque, locally known as Pashchimpada masjid (mosque). According to the inscription, the Rikabi Bazar Mosque was built by one Malik Abdullah Miah, son of Amin Khan Fakir Miah, in 1569 AD during the reign of Sultan sulaiman karrani.

Architectural features of this mosque include massive walls, a large dome, two-centred pointed archways and a dome supported by blocked arches springing from brick pilanters in combination with pendentive and half-domed squinches. These are very feature similar to the Goaldi Mosque in sonargaon and baba saleh's mosque in Bandar, both in narayanganj district. [Muhammed Nasir Uddin]