Wednesday, 8 Nov 2023

Hello, good morning. As I mentioned, I want to talk about Projek Masjid because I visited three mosques during the duration of the conference. I actually planned to visit six, with four mosques and the other two being just two suraus. But I only managed to visit three, but that's okay, three is good.

I want to talk about the last one I visited, that's Masjid Jamek Kampung Baru. It's about maybe 7 to 10 minutes walking from the LRT station. I think it was Kampung Baru station. As you walk, you will encounter a great scene of a night market. There are a lot of stalls, hawkers, and restaurants that you can try, and they're quite affordable. I love the ambiance of it as you're going to the mosque. Even the mosque itself is quite nice. It's very well maintained, I would say. Yeah, it's definitely well maintained, way more than Masjid India. Like I mentioned before, it really depends on whether you have people living close to the mosque. If not, it's gonna be quite abandoned, I would say. That's one thing.

The other thing, I talked during the video in the video of Masjid India, if I'm not mistaken, where in terms of the demography, over here we can see the typical demography of people coming to the mosque. It will be pretty much only Malay which makes sense because Kampung Baru consists of the majority Malay population, which I'm not surprised. And the other stereotype is most people coming there are probably on the right end of the spectrum in terms of age. Other than that, I think the service was quite nice. They were having some sort of event, a recitation of Yassin probably. I'm not sure. I didn't stay for the whole duration of it because I do have to catch my train back to my university. It was nice. The ambiance was nice.

Yeah, I think I want to mention in this video the difference in mentality when it comes to praying during congregational prayer. At Masjid India, you can see all sorts of different people coming just to pray together when the prayer time comes. Everyone would be there. They would just pretty much put on hold whatever they're doing and just pray at the masjid for a few minutes. Whereas over in this area, Kampung Baru, we can see all the bustling activities of doing businesses are still going on despite the prayer. Maybe because it's the Isyak prayer where you have a long period to do it. But when it comes to the mentality of praying at the mosque together in congregational prayers, I think we are quite behind in terms of prioritizing that compared to foreigners, for example. I don't know why that is. Obviously, it's not unique to our population; it's pretty much all over the world. But it would be nice to see if we actually set our priorities straight first. Even I myself, I do need reminders where praying in congregation would be a thousand times better, 27 times better to be specific than praying at home. Especially when delaying it would not bring any benefits to us. So I do need reminders from time to time.

It's been two or three days now. In terms of the mosque, it pretty much blends in with the other buildings, Masjid Jamek Kampung Baru, I mean. Other than that, nothing much really. So it's a very nice mosque, by the way. I would frequent that mosque if I were to live around that area because it's close to restaurants, there are actually people living there around the area, so it's a very nice place to live. And you don't need to own a car to be there, if that makes sense.

The one thing that I noticed with all the mosques in KL is just that, in the city center specifically, it's less pedestrian-friendly than if you were, for example, in the mosque in Bangi I mentioned earlier where the safety of pedestrians might not be as high as the one in Kuala Lumpur, for example. So yeah, it's a very nice, less car-centric, I would say, but not really pedestrian-friendly. Especially with all the restaurants; for some reason, I think they should just pedestrianize the whole thing, but there are still cars coming through the street, which I think is quite weird. In a sense, very, very weird. So I think they should just pedestrianize the whole thing. It would be a much nicer place to enjoy your meal.

Other than that, I think that's it. So thank you for listening and bye bye.

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