Cloak of Muhammad

Mosque of the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad
Religion
Affiliation	Islam
Province	Kandahar Province
Location
Location	Kandahar, Afghanistan

The Mosque of the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, in Kandahar, is considered to be one of the holiest sites in Afghanistan, and even considered by some as the "heart of Afghanistan".

The building's exteriors are of green marble from Lashkar Gah, with tiled surfaces and gilded archways. The cloak which gives the building its name is locked away inside the building and can only rarely be seen. It was given to Ahmad Shah Durrani by the Amir of Bukhara in 1768 as a move to solidify a treaty.

There is an alternate version of the story of how Ahmad Shah acquired the cloak, which has received much the same degree of national acceptance in Afghanistan as the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has in the United States. The story relates that once, when Ahmad Shah traveled to Bukhara, he saw the cloak of Mohammed there. He detemined to take the artifact with him to Kandahar, and asked whether he could "borrow" the cloak from its keepers. They, worrying he might try to remove it from Bukhara, told him it could not be taken from the city. Ahmad Shah is then said to have pointed to a stone on the ground and told that he would not pass the cloak from that stone over there. The keepers, gratified at his answer, gave him the cloak. Ahmad Shah then took the cloak, along with the stone he had pointed to, back with him to Kandahar, where the stone is now mounted on a pedestal.

It is traditionally only brought out during times of crisis. It had not been seen in public since 1930 when, in 1996, Mullah Mohammed Omar removed it from the shrine and held it before a large crowd in Kandahar, claiming that it was a symbol of his status as the Mullah Al-Momineen. It has not been seen in public since 1996 but in 2001 the former Governor of Kandahar Province, Gul Agha Sherzai, got a chance to kiss it.