The Sultan Mosque

There is a huge mosque in this neighborhood. The first one, built by the Prince, was finished in 1824. It was a wooden structure, with strong Indian influences in the architecture. It lasted about 100 years, until 1924 when the current structure was built. This one is concrete (Raffles had decreed that everything had to be built out of concrete when he saw the wooden houses being built on stilts – the man was a heck of a City Planner!).

This Mosque looks much like what we in the west think of – onion-shaped tops, towers (minarets), arabic writing and lots of color. It’s a beautiful structure and was largely funded by Arab philanthropists, who did a lot of things like that – schools, hospitals, etc.

When it was being constructed, the local community wanted to have some input and help, but being the bottom of Singapore society, they had no money for the most part. What they did, though, was save bottles.

Soy sauce bottles, apparently, which had a deposit on them like coke bottles used to have. They saved the bottles up to get money to help build the Mosque. This so impressed the architect, that there is a band of bottles that make up the brown belt between the body of the building and the primary dome.

From small efforts come great things.

The Mosque, like most other religious buildings in Asia, asks that you wear sleeves and long pants, and that you remove your shoes when you come in. Also, non-Muslims were restricted to the back of the sanctuary while we toured. It was an easy concept – “Stay off the carpet.” It wasn’t any more restrictive, though, than any other church.

Our guide is a practicing Muslim, so she offered to answer any questions we might have had. It’s probably a sad comment that most of us didn’t know enough about the faith to ask any questions.

The services are gender-separated. In this particular Mosque, women have a balcony upstairs and there’s a separate, curtained-off area for those who can’t make the climb – elderly, infirm, new mothers.

Although there is a call to prayer 5 times a day (and it’s offered 7x in this particular congregation), the general practice is to go twice.

Friday at noon is “Church”, and is a time of obligation.

Everyone covers their head during the service, and faces the curved part of the church (which is usually at the front), as this is oriented toward Mecca.

There are five Tenets of Islam:

1. Profession of Faith
2. Prayer
3. Fasting
4. Almsgiving and Charity Work
5. Pilgrimage to Mecca

In the Mosque, there are no statues or figurines. If there is decoration, it is either something from Nature or calligraphy, usually in Arabic. The theory behind this is that nobody knows what God looks like, so why should we risk getting it wrong?