Ashrafpur an archaeologically important village under Shibpur upazila of Narshingdi district. A villager named Mia Baksh Khan found two seventh century copper plates from a mound of the village in 1885. The copper plate inscriptions reveal that Devakhadga of the Khadga Dynasty granted lands for certain Buddhist Sanggha and Vihara. Old bricks and ramains of a ruined wall have been traced underneath the soil. No systematic excavation, however, could be possible in the site because of later human habitation. Scholars are of opinion that at the site there was a Buddhist Vihara and it was a centre of Buddhist religion and learning.
Ashrafpur Mosque an inscribed stone, which was once attached to the mosque and now preserved in the Bangladesh National Museum, reveals that the mosque was built in 930 AH/ 1524 AD by Dilwar Khan during the reign of Sultan Nasiruddin Abul Muzaffar Nusrat Shah (1519-1532).
The mosque, ruined by the earthquake of 1897, was abandoned, prayer in it discontinued and in course of time it got shrouded by jungle. In 1940 the jungle was cleared and the mosque recovered under the leadership of Moulana Syed Ali. Even at that time the Mihrab and a portion of the western wall was extant. It was a single domed small mosque built in the sultanate style. Later on a three-domed modern mosque has been built on the same site where once stood the Sultani mosque.
[Courtesy: Iftekhar Uddin Bhuiyan]
