When he returned to Delhi, he decided to commemorate this great victory by building the first-ever mosque in the city. But it was not enough to simply build the Quwwat-ul-Islam, the ‘glory of Islam’. It necessitated an emphatic spectacle of what this glory meant in actual practice. Accordingly, he demolished26 twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples and used their debris as construction material. The Quwwat-ul-Islam is noted27 for the Qutub Minar, the ‘tower of victory’, celebrating and stamping the first-ever Muslim conquest in the heart of Delhi. The same applies to the ‘construction’ of the
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