Islam in Hong Kong

Prayer before a mosque

On 26 January 1841 a first contingent of Indian troops landed at Possession Point. Among them were Muslim soldiers and lascars — sailors of the Indian Ocean — from Punjab, the North-West and the south. They settled around what became Upper and Lower Lascar Row in Sheung Wan. There was no masjid. For jumuʿah they stood in the street, rain or shine, on ground the Portuguese had already named for the Moor.

In 1849 four men — Shaik Moosdeen, Mahomed Arab, Shaik Carther and Hassan Malay — took a 999-year lease of Inland Lot 268 at a peppercorn rent, as trustees of the Mussulman community. The plot is 30 Shelley Street. The first mosque on it was a modest hall; the pale building and minaret you walk up to today were raised in 1915–16 with a gift from Haji Mohamed Essack Elias, a Bombay merchant. It is Hong Kong’s oldest masjid, a declared monument, still used for salah.

Barracks, Trustees, and a second shore

After Kowloon was ceded, Muslim sepoys of the Hong Kong Regiment — Khattak, Yusufzai, men of Jhelum, Rawalpindi, Hazara and Gujrat — were housed at Whitfield Barracks, where Kowloon Park now sits. They prayed in a makeshift hall until Colonel E. G. Barrow granted land beside the camp. Kowloon Mosque opened in 1896. The marble landmark at Nathan Road is the 1984 rebuild, after MTR blasting left the old mosque unsafe; jumuʿah there is still the city’s largest.

In 1917 the colonial government and the community wrote rules that became the Incorporated Trustees of the Islamic Community Fund — still the body that holds the masjids and the cemeteries. From the 1910s, Hui families fleeing unrest on the mainland gathered in Wan Chai. The Chinese Muslim Cultural & Fraternal Association (中華回教博愛社) and, later, Masjid Ammar (1967, rebuilt 1981) gave that congregation a home; IUHK still keeps the prayer times this guide follows.

Six halls on the harbour

Stanley Mosque (1937) was built for Muslim staff of the prison. Chai Wan Mosque (1963) stands beside the Muslim cemetery at Cape Collinson, used for janazah as well as daily salah. Ibrahim Mosque (2013), under the West Kowloon Corridor in Mong Kok, is the sixth public masjid, raised by a later generation of South Asian families. Campus musallas, including City University, serve students who are not a jumuʿah congregation of their own.

Hong Kong’s ummah is Indian, Pakistani, Hui, Indonesian, African, Nepali and local-born. It is not a sahaba story. It is a port story: men who kept salah in a lane until the lease was signed, and a city that still has six roofs pointed at Makkah. Visit Jamia with modest dress; the courtyard is small and the monument is lived-in, not a museum.

Visit

Jamia is the oldest hall; Kowloon and Masjid Ammar take the largest jumuʿah. Stanley, Chai Wan and Ibrahim are in the Masjid directory.