The Sound of the Masjid: Lessons from the Communal Character of Indonesian Mosques
M. Tata Taufik
Abstract
Debates over mosque loudspeakers in Indonesia are often framed too quickly as a contest between religious expression and noise, or between piety and tolerance. This article proposes a different starting point. The Indonesian mosque is historically and socially rooted in community initiative, waqf, local leadership, and collective participation. Its amplified sound should therefore be read not only as religious sound but also as an audible extension of community life. Drawing on Islamic communication ethics and the institutional history of Indonesian mosques, the article interprets the mosque as a locally embedded communication institution whose modern organizational form has not erased the authority of religious opinion leaders. Conflict arises when this community-building function enters spaces increasingly understood through privacy and democratic rights. Both claims possess legitimacy. The task, therefore, is neither silencing the mosque nor granting unlimited acoustic privilege, but developing fair and context-sensitive negotiation of a shared soundscape.
Keywords: mosque; Indonesia; community building; Islamic communication ethics; loudspeaker; soundscape; DKM
A Mosque Born from Community
Indonesia offers an unusual landscape of Islamic institutions. The Dewan Masjid Indonesia (DMI) currently estimates that the country has around 800,000 mosque buildings, while the Ministry of Religious Affairs’ SIMAS database records more than 709,000 registered mosques and musallas. The difference reflects different categories and methods of registration, but both figures make one point unmistakable: the mosque is one of Indonesia’s most extensive social institutions.
More important than the number is the way these mosques come into being. SIMAS records that more than 264,000 of its registered mosques stand on waqf land. Studies of Indonesian mosque architecture likewise observe that a large proportion of local mosques are designed, built, and developed by communities (Maslucha, 2012). This fits a long Indonesian pattern: a family donates land, a respected religious figure or community leader initiates the project, residents contribute money or materials, and the congregation gradually builds the institution around it. Government-built grand mosques certainly exist, and state assistance has also played a role. Yet the dominant social imagination of the neighborhood mosque remains strongly communal.
This characteristic distinguishes Indonesia, at least in degree, from more centralized systems of mosque administration found in a number of Muslim-majority states. The Indonesian mosque is not simply a local branch of a national religious bureaucracy. It has usually grown inside an existing social network.
From Religious Opinion Leader to Modern Management
That community origin helps explain another characteristic: the enduring role of the local religious opinion leader. Before modern organizational charts became common, mosques already had figures whose authority was recognized by the congregation – the kiai, ajengan, tuan guru, imam, penghulu, or another respected local scholar. Their leadership depended less on bureaucratic appointment than on religious knowledge, trust, personal history, and social recognition.
Modernization did not necessarily eliminate this pattern. It formalized it. The Ministry of Religious Affairs established Bakemas, later called Badan Kesejahteraan Masjid (BKM), in 1964, while DMI was founded in 1972. Over time, local mosque management became increasingly familiar with formal structures such as the Dewan Kemakmuran Masjid (DKM), complete with chairperson, secretary, treasurer, and divisions for worship, education, social affairs, and youth.
Yet organizational modernization should not automatically be confused with a transfer of religious legitimacy. A mosque may have a modern committee while decisions about imams, preachers, religious teaching, or the moral direction of the congregation remain strongly influenced by trusted religious leaders. This suggests a useful hypothesis for further empirical research: Indonesian mosque management has experienced organizational modernization while retaining locally rooted religious-social authority.
This pattern can also be read through Islamic communication ethics. In Etika Komunikasi Islam, I approach communication not merely as the transmission of messages but as a process governed by ethical responsibility and the moral quality of the communicative relationship (Taufik, 2012). Seen from this perspective, the local religious leader is not merely a source of messages. His authority as a communicator grows from knowledge, credibility, trust, and continuing relations with the community. The mosque therefore functions as a communication institution even before technology extends its reach. Its communicative strength lies not simply in the number of people who can hear a message, but in the social and moral relationship within which the message is received.
When the Masjid Acquired an Amplified Voice
The loudspeaker dramatically extended that communication node. The unaided human voice once established a natural acoustic boundary around the mosque. Amplification changed the radius without necessarily changing the community’s understanding of what the mosque was doing. The adhan, Qur’anic recitation, religious instruction, announcements of death, Ramadan activities, and other information could now travel beyond the mosque walls and enter homes, streets, shops, and neighborhoods.
Research on the Indonesian Islamic soundscape has shown that technological amplification changes both the reach and the social meaning of the adhan (Pratisti, 2020). The issue is therefore not reducible to decibels. Sound marks presence. To members of the congregation, a familiar mosque sound may signify prayer time, belonging, memory, moral reminder, and communal continuity. To another listener – Muslim or non-Muslim, Indonesian or visitor – the same amplified sound may be experienced as an unwanted intrusion into private space.
Here lies the real tension. The mosque operates within a community-building framework, while modern urban citizens increasingly also inhabit a privacy-and-democratic-rights framework. The first affirms a community’s legitimate right to religious expression and collective life. The second affirms an individual’s legitimate claim to rest, privacy, comfort, and equal treatment in shared space.
Both claims are legitimate. Therefore, the issue cannot simply be reduced to intolerance.
From Contest to Negotiation
Indonesia has already recognized this dual reality. Ministry of Religious Affairs Circular Letter No. SE 05/2022 does not prohibit mosque loudspeakers. It distinguishes external from internal speakers, sets a maximum volume of 100 dB, and regulates when external amplification is appropriate. The policy is significant because it treats religious expression and social consideration not as mutually exclusive principles but as interests that must be accommodated together. Recent scholarship similarly argues for moderation through attention to time, volume, acoustic quality, environment, and culture (Riyanto, 2023; 2024).
There is also a useful consistency test. Modern public space is never genuinely silent. Communities routinely negotiate traffic, markets, political campaigns, weddings, concerts, festivals, and commercial entertainment. This does not justify excessive mosque noise: “other people are noisy too” is not a serious ethical principle. But it does raise a democratic question. If privacy and public comfort are the standards, they should be applied fairly across different sources of sound. Religious sound should neither be singled out for exceptional restriction nor granted unlimited exemption because it is religious.
The same point applies to the wider communication environment. Contemporary life is saturated by commercial, political, entertainment, and digital messages, some constructive and some destructive. The audible presence of the mosque is one part of that larger ecology of messages. A democratic society should be able to make room for an ethical and religious voice while also requiring that voice to exercise social responsibility.
The Indonesian experience therefore offers a lesson beyond the technical management of loudspeakers. The sound of the masjid is not merely sound transmitted through a device; it is the audible presence of a religious community in a shared social space. Because that space is shared, neither community nor individual can claim it absolutely.
The way forward is negotiation: appropriate time, duration, volume, purpose, acoustic quality, and sensitivity to local context. Such negotiation does not weaken religious expression. On the contrary, it places the mosque within the very ethic of social responsibility that gives community life its moral meaning. In this sense, an Indonesian mosque can remain unmistakably present without treating presence as domination – and democratic privacy can be protected without demanding the disappearance of religion from the public soundscape.
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