Qualla: The Mosque That Built a School

The Mosque That Built a School: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Berthold, CC BY-SA 4.0. Build the mosque first, Hamka said. The school can wait. It was 1952, and fourteen members of the Masyumi Party had just founded the Islamic Dormitory School Foundation with the goal of establishing both a mosque and a school in Kebayoran Baru, Jakarta's newest planned suburb. The mayor had donated four hectares of land. The Ministry of Religious Affairs had scraped together a modest construction fund. The question was what to build first. Hamka -- one of Indonesia's most influential Islamic scholars, a prolific author, political activist, and future Chief Imam -- had a practical answer: build the mosque, but fill it with offices, meeting rooms, and classroom space so that education could begin before the school walls went up. It was a decision that would define Al-Azhar Great Mosque for the next seven decades.

Image: Daniel Berthold | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Mosque That Built a School: From Suburb to Sanctuary

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rhmtdns, CC BY-SA 4.0. Kebayoran Baru was barely a decade old when construction of the mosque commenced on November 19, 1953. Planned by Dutch urban designers in the 1940s as a garden suburb south of Jakarta's colonial core, the neighborhood was still filling in -- wide boulevards lined with modest hou...

Image: Rhmtdns | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Mosque That Built a School: A Name from Cairo

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JahlilMA, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1960, Mahmud Shaltut, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar University in Cairo, visited Jakarta. Al-Azhar is one of the oldest and most prestigious centers of Islamic learning in the world, founded in 970 AD. When Shaltut toured the Kebayoran mosque, he proposed that it take the name of...

Image: JahlilMA | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Mosque That Built a School: Through the Crisis

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PL09Puryono, CC0. That mission was tested almost immediately. In 1965, following the 30 September Movement -- a still-debated series of events in which six army generals were killed, triggering a political upheaval that toppled President Sukarno and ushered in Suharto's New Order -- Al-Azhar Great...

Image: PL09Puryono | CC0

The Mosque That Built a School: Classrooms in Every Direction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rahmatdenas, CC BY-SA 4.0. A kindergarten opened in the mosque complex in 1967, the first brick in what would become an educational empire. Over the following decades, Al-Azhar expanded its schools across Jakarta and eventually across Indonesia, offering curricula that combined Islamic religious instructio...

Image: Rahmatdenas | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Mosque That Built a School: Heritage and Horizon

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0. On August 19, 1993, Al-Azhar Great Mosque was designated both a Jakarta heritage site and a national cultural heritage property. The recognition honored not just the building's architecture -- the white onion dome, the single minaret, the Middle Eastern-influenced design that was...

Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 3.0