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A city of lights, love, and ancient lore. By Bapsi Sidhwa | From the March 1 & 8, 2013 issue.    Ali Arif / AFP L ahore. If I toss up the word and close my eyes, it conjures up gardens and fragrances. Not only the formal Mughal gardens, with their obedient rows of fountains and cypresses, or the acreage of the club-strewn Lawrence Gardens, but the gardens in thousands of private houses with their riot of spring flowers. There is a carnival of jewel colors embedded in emerald lawns and hedges—a defiant brilliance of kachnar, bougainvillea and gulmohur silhouetted against an azure sky. And the winter and spring air are heady. They make the blood hum. I have spent most of my life in Lahore, and the city of 11 million provides the geographical location of my novels. Its ambience has molded my sensibility and also my emotional responses. To belong to Lahore is to be steeped in its romance, to inhale with each breath an intensity of feeling that demands ...

A mosque is a place of worship for followers of Islam. Muslims often refer to the mosque by its Arabic name, Masjid. The mosque serves as a place where Muslims can come together for prayer as well as a center for information, education and dispute settlement. This post features top 20 largest mosques of the world, hope you will like our effort. 20. Al Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem.   Al-Aqsa Mosque also known as al-Aqsa, is an Islamic holy place in the Old City of Jerusalem. The site that includes the mosque (along with the Dome of the Rock) is also referred to as al-Haram ash-Sharif or “Sacred Noble Sanctuary”, a site also known as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, the place where the First and Second Temples are generally accepted to have stood. Widely considered as the third holiest site in Islam, Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad  was transported from the Sacred Mosque in Mecca to al-Aqsa during the Night Journey. Islamic tradition holds that Muham...