Shaikh Khurshid Hasan, retired from the Pakistan Federal Department of Archaeology, has produced a modest but useful compendium of extant fortified buildings, which has accompanied my visits over the last year to sites in Pakistan. These range, geographically, from Sindh, Baluchistan and Punjab, the Bahawalpur ex-princely state, to the North West Frontier including Chitral, and the Northern Areas comprising Gilgit, Hunza and Baltistan; in time, they range from the late Neolithic to the British colonial period, with greatest attention given to the buildings of the Islamic period from the initial Arab conquest of Sindh in the eighth century CE and the Turkish penetration of the Peshawar plain and the Salt Range in the eleventh century CE to the decline of Muslim political power with the advent of the Sikhs in Lahore and Multan from the late eighteenth century CE. The term ‘post-Muslim’ might raise eyebrows in the still fervently Islamic state of modern Pakistan. The coverage of individual sites is varied: some are described in detail and supplied with rich historiographic material from their own epigraphy as well as from such classic sources as the Islamic chroniclers and the colonial travellers and gazetteers which have been effectively and extensively mined by the writer; other sites are mentioned sketchily. But it is perhaps in the listing of smaller, more obscure sites that the book is really useful, as the grander fortifications of Rohtas, Attock and Lahore have been adequately treated elsewhere.

The tone is homely, with a dedication to a deceased uncle who fostered the writer in childhood and credit given to a nephew who trawled the internet for relevant articles (by contemporary luminaries such as Richard Hughes, Robert Hillenbrand, Ebba Koch, George Michell) to add to the bibliography: the problems of private amateur scholars in developing countries accessing current scholarship are not to be underestimated. The English style is unidiomatic, a witness to declining standards of English spoken and written in Pakistan, especially among those who have come up through the less-prestigious, publicly-funded Urdu-medium schools. The illustrations are small, often fuzzy, apparently tourist snapshots processed on the computer, though the writer must be given credit for actually taking the trouble to visit these often remote sites. Compared to other publications on the Pakistan-built heritage (Ahmad Nabi Khan 1983, Kamal Khan Mumtaz 1985) this publication falls short in terms of depth and comprehensiveness of research, consistency and coherence of methodology, fluency and briskness of presentation.

The writer rightly points out that evolving techniques of warfare influenced the construction of fortifications – even a casual visitor will notice the height of entrance gateways adapted to the scale of elephants with howdahs, and the sharp spikes on many gates to deter elephants used as battering rams. He also points out that modern, especially aerial, warfare has rendered these historical structures obsolete; that trade routes and strategic strong-points, even rivers, have changed course or position, leaving these buildings often stranded in remote backwaters; that the value of these historical forts in “guarding the frontiers of Pakistan's history” is not always commensurate with the cost of stabilising or restoring them – or of rendering them accessible to the wider public where they are still occupied by the military as prisons etc. He could have been clearer and more consistent in categorising the buildings according to the building materials and structural techniques - both vernacular as well as self-consciously learned traditions, as well as the status and training of the craftsmen and engineer-architects who built these structures (mud and mud brick and baked brick in the Indus valley civilisation and later Sindh and Punjab, rubble-filled wood-framed “cator and cribbage” structures in the forested northern highlands, baked brick and plaster and stone-faced prestige fortifications of the Suri and Mughal imperial rulers, etc). I would have appreciated more on the social uses of these buildings as watch-towers or temporary refuges in areas of feuding mountaineers and marauding nomads, as military strong-points on the margins of empire to hold down hostile populations, as fortified palace complexes, etc. There is no reference for the early period to the Artha Shastra's discussion of the “durga” fortified settlement with ditch and rampart and walls and gates (Allchin, 1995), which would have been useful. The geographical coverage is uneven, with a rather thin account of the Northern Areas, omitting the Balti forts of Shigar and Khaplu, and Mastuj on the borders of Chitral, as well as countless fortified “qal'a” farmsteads of the Tribal Areas of NWFP. Finally a more emphatic record of these important buildings’ current state of conservation and potential future use would have been desirable.

The early Muslim fortifications of Banbhore on a creek just inland from the sea coast east of Karachi are still very atmospheric and well laid out for visitors; the Talpur fort of Kotdiji in Sindh completed in 1830 is one of the most attractive hilltop fortifications in baked brick, but was already a white elephant by the time it was brought into use, incapable of resisting the firepower of the British Indian army, though capable of warding off passing nomad warriors; the island fort of Bakhar on the Indus was built of bricks taken from the old Arab capital at Alor, and was the scene of the Mughal Emperor Humayun's unsuccessful bid in 1541 to establish himself in Sindh, though he was offered a garden a short distance away to celebrate his marriage with Hamida Begum – difficult to visit as it is still occupied by the army; the mud-built city fortifications of Hyderabad, the Kalhora capital from 1768, now largely engulfed in building encroachments from the town, were already dismissed by British observers of the early nineteenth century as militarily useless; the 1733 ‘Abbasi Daudpotra fort of Derawar in the Cholistan desert lies next to the magnificent royal necropolis; the saline-eroded baked brick sites of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, setting the style for much of later Indus valley architecture, which were plundered for colonial railway lines; among the marvels of the Lahore fort are the Jehangir period picture wall tiles on the wall that once overhung the Ravi river – which has since moved - and the Jehangir period frescoes in the Kala Burj (Hasan seems not to agree with Koch on precise dating, 1617 or 1631) that are not visible to the public, as well as the Nolakha white marble bungalow of Shah Jehan, which survived despoliation by Sikh and British troops; the magnificent 1541 stone-built Rohtas fort of Sher Shah Suri constructed to suppress the pro-Mughal Gakhar tribes on the edge of the Salt Range, with its great gateways and its later sixteenth-century haveli of Man Singh, threatened by extreme erosion of the loose soil washed away into the Kahan river below the fort; the Fort of Hund, where Alexander crossed the Indus, now disappeared in the expansion of the modern village; the Emperor Akbar's 1583 Fort of Attock, guarding the crossing of the Indus from rebels in Kabul, is still used by the military as a prison and barracks, and by vast colonies of large bats as a roosting place before they fly out in long columns at dusk to feed on the orchards upstream; the Bala Hisar at Peshawar, recently excavated and publicised in the Current World Archaeology magazine, but difficult to visit due to Foreign Office advice against non-essential travel to the area; the forts of Swat, including the remains of a mosque said to go back to the invasion of Mahmud of Ghazni; the fort of Chitral, partly rebuilt and dangerously decayed since the famous ‘minor siege’ in 1895 described by Robertson; the forts of Baltit and Altit and Shigar and Khaplu built in the vernacular wood and rubble style common from Badakhshan to Ladakh and recently restored by the Agha Khan Trust for Culture, one as an excellent hotel: all these provide a focus for a culturally- and historically-aware traveller in Pakistan who wants to look beyond the surviving prestige funerary and religious buildings and to see the secular heritage that has suffered so much more from changing needs and fashions than the still venerated shrines and mosques. Of course these latter, still-living buildings are in danger less from neglect than from ill-conceived refurbishment or total rebuilding in concrete. But if Pakistan is to have a defined and definable national character – even as part of a greater historical and cultural continuum from India to Afghanistan - its architectural heritage must be preserved and made accessible. This book makes a valuable plea for that to happen. Let us hope that concerned individuals and public authorities will listen and act in time.

Readers interested in fortified buildings might care to browse through my old German school teacher Peter Willey's book “Eagle's Nest – Isma'ili Castles in Iran and Syria” (London, 2005), which also touches briefly on the Northern Areas of Pakistan, and is an informal travelogue by an amateur who has actually visited all the sites he describes – especially valuable for the so-far unrecorded castle at Soru near Semnan.