Sultan Mosque

Sultan Hussein Shah, after whom the mosque is named, never saw its golden domes. After his father's death, Johor nobles placed his younger brother on the throne: Hussein was away at the time. He needed recognition of his title, while Stamford Raffles needed a Malay ruler's signature on permission for the East India Company to establish a trading post in Singapore. In February eighteen nineteen, Hussein was proclaimed Sultan of Johor; in return, he signed a treaty, received an annual allowance, and gained British protection.

Hussein settled in Kampong Gelam. In eighteen twenty-three, he asked for a mosque to be built beside his residence, and Raffles promised three thousand dollars for its construction. The first mosque was built of brick and covered with a tiered tiled roof. It was completed by eighteen twenty-six. Its name came from the court mosque of Sultan Hussein.

Over time, his descendants transferred its administration to the congregation. After nineteen fourteen, the board of trustees included two representatives from each of Singapore's six Muslim communities: Arab, Bugis, Javanese, Malay, North Indian, and Tamil. They managed the mosque when the old building began to deteriorate.

On January first, nineteen twenty-four, Mahmud bin Haji Daud, a merchant of Bombay origin and a respected community figure, called a meeting and proposed rebuilding the mosque completely. He became the secretary and treasurer of the building committee and pursued the project until the end of his life.

There was not enough money. In nineteen twenty-six, the committee asked the Sultan of Johor and the colonial administration for help, but unsuccessfully. They then elected another thirty-seven fundraisers: each appealed to his own community—from Arabs, Bugis, and Javanese to people from Bombay, Punjab, and South India. Four years went into fundraising and preparation. Once work began, prayers continued amid the construction.

According to Kampong Gelam oral tradition, poor residents who had no money to donate brought empty soy sauce bottles. The building committee gave them to the Irish architect Denis Santry and asked him to find a use for them. The documents do not establish who first conceived of this collection—the committee or the architect. Santry turned the cut-off bottoms into rows of glass discs around the bases of both domes.

The new mosque opened on December twenty-seventh, nineteen twenty-nine, the last Friday of the year. Mahmud Daud died in nineteen thirty-one, before living to see the work fully completed; construction finished a year later. The two-story prayer hall holds up to five thousand people. Beneath the gold of both domes, dark rings of bottle bottoms still run around them.