JAKARTA: Fakhry Affan could easily qualify as a human catalog with information on every Muslim place of worship across Indonesia.
For the past seven years, the official from the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MRA) has been in charge of its Sistem Informasi Masjid (SIMAS), or Mosque Information System — a digitized database to find out how many mosques the world’s largest Muslim majority nation has.
“This is a never-ending job with new mosques and musallas constructed all the time,” Affan told Arab News.
A musalla is an open space outside a mosque, mainly used for prayer.
The idea is to get the best estimate on the number of mosques in the country, where more than 80 percent of its 270 million population is Muslim.
Affan said that before the SIMAS’ establishment in 2013, various agencies had issued different estimates on the total number of mosques in the country without…
Work is worship: Indonesia’s 5,000 mosque counters seek to answer one question
