Friday Prayers at Orchard

During my recent Singapore overnight stop, I had the chance to visit one of the mosque there for Friday prayers. It was only a 10 minute walk from the hotel we were staying and the timing was just right as we were going towards a lunch recess.

The mosque, called Masjid Al-Falah stood right behind a Holiday Inn hotel in the middle of Orchard Road, the main shopping district in Singapore. It was at a simple building, only marked with some simple letterings. It was already crowded when we arrived, and we got a spot on the upper floors where the Muslimah usually attend.

The toilets and the absolution area was clearly marked and conveniently placed. And this being Singapore, they were spotless.

Impressive. The whole setup was great. The sermon was in Malay and the subject matters were straight to the point and easy to digest. None of the political connotations we were preached to in the mosques in KL. Towards the end of his sermon, the khatib then switched seamlessly into fluent English in summarising his talk.

We could do with some of that back home as the mosque I went to in Gombak had a large Yemeni and Somalian community attending.