Indonesia, again, to try get noisy mosques to tone down

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Every year, the struggle is the same: How to prevent some 800,000 mosques across the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation from putting their speakers on full blast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. 

Every year, authorities fail. But they’re not giving up yet. 

In a new attempt to tackle the issue, Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who is also head of a body grouping many of the country’s mosques, has formed a team to take samples of noise from mosque speakers across the country, his spokesman Husain Abdullah told AFP on Thursday, April 25.

“The idea is for mosques to turn down the volume a little so that the sound can be heard only by residents in the immediate area,” he said, adding that the aim was to have a “more harmonious, melodious sound coming from mosques”.

He said that mosques also had to ensure that the sounds they produced did not overlap with noises from others nearby, saying there was often a “war of the loudspeakers” between places of worship in the same area which try to outdo each other by playing sermons loudly.

The new group, set up earlier this month, had collected many samples and would send a report to the vice president, who planned to sit down with Indonesia’s top Muslim clerical body and Islamic organizations and discuss how to tackle the issue.

The new group would complement a previous initiative, which saw around 100 teams of technicians deployed across the country to help fine-tune mosque loudspeakers and give advice on how best to arrange speakers to reduce noise.

Will it work this time?

Abdullah admitted regulating noisy mosques across the world’s biggest archipelago nation would be tough and called on the clerical body, the Indonesian Council of Ulema, to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, on the issue.

A fatwa, though, is not legally enforceable. On the other hand, people who complain about noisy mosques often find themselves in trouble.

In 2010, an American man was jailed for 5 months in West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, after he stormed into a musholla, or prayer room, during Ramadan prayers and unplugged the speaker cables.

In 2013, an angry mob threatened to kill an elderly Indonesian who filed a lawsuit in Banda Aceh complaining of being disturbed by lengthy recordings of Koranic verses. But though Sayed Hasan, 75, dropped the case, he said he was happy because the mosque toned down its volume. – Reports from Agence France-Presse/Rappler.com