Spirit of the mosque

By Prof Dr MOHAMAD TAJUDDIN
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Lecturer

Mosques should not be about how grand they are. They should be all about recreating the spirit of the Prophet’s mosque.

IT seems to me that, in the minds of Malaysian Muslims as well as Muslims around the world, building the biggest and most expensive mosques would be the greatest gift man could make to Allah the Most High. I am not sure where they get the idea from, but it is certainly not from the sayings, or hadith, of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Or perhaps they are thinking of the saying that if one were to build a mosque for the Muslim community, Allah will reward one with a big house in Paradise – ergo, the bigger the mosque, the bigger the reward. Well, I think Muslims who think like this have forgotten one teensy, weensy little detail about the mosque: its spirit. It is the spirit and values of this institution that should be emphasised, not its architecture.

Before the grand design must come the values and culture of the users. Before the mosque, must come the responsibilities of the Muslim community towards the individual, and vice versa. Muslim scholars are always pointing out that in Islam, unlike in Christianity or other religions, there is no priesthood. The whole community must ensure that there are ustazs, or learned scholars, to explain Islam not only to Muslims but also non-Muslim societies for mutual understanding. If not, the whole community would be committing a grave sin.

The other responsibility of the community and the individual is the amar maaruf nahi munkar or the encouragement of good deeds and the discouragement or prevention of evil deeds.

These objectives and principles can be spelled out in terms of activities and functions, which in turn can be used to generate actual spaces, furniture, and structures to fit the activities and functions. Now that is real architecture. Not the I-saw-a-beautiful-Ottoman-mosque-so-I’m-going-to-copy-it approach to design so many architects seem to take nowadays.

In today’s column I wish to question one important feature that is totally missing from not only the multi-million ringgit mosques but from most mosques in Malaysia: the place for suffa.

When the Prophet fled from the hostile forces of Mecca and made for the sanctuary of Medinah, He built His home where His camel stopped to rest to deal diplomatically with the many invitations from the Medinans.

His adobe brick home was a simple affair of several small apartments in a row for His wives, a generous wall system that fenced up a squarish compound with one roof structure covering the links to the apartments and another roof structure at the opposite end. In the middle of the compound was a courtyard open to the sky. It was nothing more than the typical simple Arab house that can still be seen today.

Now read the following two hadiths concerning the spirit that imbued the Prophet’s mosque when He was alive:

“Anas bin Malik reported that some people came to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and said to Him: ‘Send with us some men who may teach us the Quran and the Sunnah.’ Accordingly, He sent 70 men from the Ansar. They were called the Reciters and among them was my uncle, Haram. They used to recite the Quran at night and ponder over its meaning and during the daytime they brought water in pitchers to the mosque, collected wood and sold it, and with the sale proceeds bought food for the people of the suffa, which were the poor who stayed in the mosque of the Prophet, and the needy.”

Mundhir bin Jarir reported on the authority of his father:

“The Messenger of Allah said, ‘He who sets a good precedent in Islam, there is a reward for him for this act of goodness and reward also of that who acted according to it subsequently, without any deductions from their rewards; and he who sets in Islam an evil precedent, there is upon him the burden of that and the burden of him also who acted upon it subsequently, without any deduction from their burden’.”

The suffa were the people who lived under the roof structure on the opposite end from the roof structure linking the apartments of the Prophet’s wives. They were of three kinds:

The first were the Muhajirrun or the Meccan people who fled the city to start a new Islamic life in Medinah. These Muhajirrun left everything, their houses, properties, relatives. They had only, as the Malays say, “Sehelai, sepinggang” (roughly, “one Right: cloth, one plate”), or, literally, the clothes on their backs. Although the Prophet had declared the Muhajirrun relatives-in-Islam with the Ansar of Medinah, most of the Muhajirrun did not want to burden their new relatives and opted to stay at the mosque.

The second kind of suffa were the poor who had nothing to begin with; they stayed at the mosque for shelter and helped maintain the building and its environs.

The third suffa were the Medinans who had homes, wealth, and relatives but who opted to be close to the Prophet and become voluntary “slaves” to Him in order to learn and benefit from the closeness to their beloved, the Prophet.

Thus we can see that the mosque of the Prophet was humble in its simplicity of adobe bricks and date palm columns but shone gloriously in the spirit of caring as well as the brotherhood of man.

The question I have for Muslims today is, simply, where is the place for the suffa in our modern, monumental, and lavishly decorated mosques? Where can the poor and needy find shelter in these multi-million ringgit structures?

I have walked and prayed in many monumental mosques, and I have yet to see one that has room for the suffa, a place where homeless people, whether they are drug addicts or prostitutes or simply poor travellers or struggling students, can abide a while. Most of the time, the mosque committee or security guard would throw such people out into the streets so they won’t “defile” the sanctity of the mosque.

As an architect and as a Muslim, I say that inconveniencing the guests of Allah in His house is a grave sin in Islam, and that there is no barakah, or blessings, in such mosques no matter how many minarets or domes they have.

It is curious to me to know that the gurdwara (Sikh temples) prepare meals daily for anyone who comes to the temple and serves them in the langar, or refractory. They feed anyone, not just the faithful. What of the multi-million ringgit mosques? Or any community mosque in Malaysia? As far as I know, food is cooked only during the month of Ramadhan, none is prepared for the needy at any other time.

The spirit of the suffa in the Prophet’s mosque should be a great lesson in the development of a mosque management system as well as in formulating the architecture of the mosque. Mosques should be a place of shelter where the needy can reside, and where those who are wealthy can open their hearts and wallet to feed these people daily. Now that is the true spirit of the mosque, be it a multi-million ringgit one or a humble structure in a village.

I would like to stress to the mosque committee as well as to the architect, the spirit of welfare is the most important spirit, one that can transform Muslim society as well as provide a new expression of humility and people-driven architecture for architects and designers.

- THE STAR
www.thestar.com.my