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If Qutb-ud-din, by building his mosque out of dismantled temples, intended a gesture of mastery and control, then it rebounded on him as the temple columns give the mosque a decidedly Indian character. The colonnades do not look like parts of a mosque in any other country where Islam had spread. Some such thought seems to have struck Qutb-ud-din (or some think his successor) because a screen of high-pointed arches, modelled on the buildings of Seljuq Persia, was added as an afterthought across the front of the prayer hall, screening some of the columns from view.

The idea seems to have been that inserting a row of pointed arches across the western side, towards which the devout faced while at prayer, would make the whole thing look less like a temple and more like a mosque.

Up to a point, it does, but even this revision was not entirely satisfactory. the arches may have the pointed outline that is distinctive of Islamic architecture worldwide, but the technology of arch construction was little known, if at all, in India at this time, and the Indian masons employed to do the job used their own traditional trabeate (post and beam) system. The arches are composed not of voussoirs (wedge-shaped pieces arranged like a fan) but of horizontal layers of stone, carved into shape. Variations in the colour of the stone make this visible even on a casual inspection from the ground. As a result, the screen may be more Islamic in appearance than the rest of the mosque, but it is still Indian in method. 

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