To the Masjid, to the Masjid
A friend of mine asked me yesterday, "do you pray at to mosque often?"
Its a simple and innocent question, I initially thought but when I wanted to answer it, I realised that it is not a simple as it seems.
Firsly, there are no mosques in Islam. "Mosque" is an English word of dubious origin. I won't get into that, its too complicated.
To Muslims, the proper word is Masjid. To understand this, you first need to understand the prefix, "mu" or "ma": it is a form of inflectional morpheme that changes the word to make it a different thing. When you add, "ma" or "mu" to the front of a verb or noun, it makes the word refer to the person who is doing the action or to the nature of the place. Let me illustrate.
Islam is the religion. If a person professes that Islam is his religion, he becomes a person who believes and holds on to Islam, he is a "mu" (doer) + islam = Muslim.
In Islam, there are several acts of worship: there is solah or solat (depending on the sentence) which is the main act of worship. Then there is doa, which is a general act of directly asking Allah for something.
So, a place where people perform solah is a "mu" (place of) + solah = musollah. So any place where people perform the solah is a musollah. This ranges from the small surau (a Malay term - prayer room at work places), neighbourhood surau (small place where the neighbours come to worship together), madrasah (slightly bigger place where people worship and hold religious classes) to the huge masjids.
A subclass of that is the masjid. the root word here is sujd which refers to a specific part of the solah process or act: it refers specifically to the part where we put our forehead on the ground. So "ma" + "sujd" = masjid - the place where people worship together and put their heads to the ground in the act of worship.
Thus to answer my friend's question, "do I pray at the masjid often?" I guess I don't go to the masjid as often as I would like to.
"Do I pray at the musollah often?" The answer is yes, I do go there regularly.
Questions like this can be somewhat difficult to answer simply because the terms that non-Muslims use do not really fit the terms we Muslims use.
Its a simple and innocent question, I initially thought but when I wanted to answer it, I realised that it is not a simple as it seems.
Firsly, there are no mosques in Islam. "Mosque" is an English word of dubious origin. I won't get into that, its too complicated.
To Muslims, the proper word is Masjid. To understand this, you first need to understand the prefix, "mu" or "ma": it is a form of inflectional morpheme that changes the word to make it a different thing. When you add, "ma" or "mu" to the front of a verb or noun, it makes the word refer to the person who is doing the action or to the nature of the place. Let me illustrate.
Islam is the religion. If a person professes that Islam is his religion, he becomes a person who believes and holds on to Islam, he is a "mu" (doer) + islam = Muslim.
In Islam, there are several acts of worship: there is solah or solat (depending on the sentence) which is the main act of worship. Then there is doa, which is a general act of directly asking Allah for something.
So, a place where people perform solah is a "mu" (place of) + solah = musollah. So any place where people perform the solah is a musollah. This ranges from the small surau (a Malay term - prayer room at work places), neighbourhood surau (small place where the neighbours come to worship together), madrasah (slightly bigger place where people worship and hold religious classes) to the huge masjids.
A subclass of that is the masjid. the root word here is sujd which refers to a specific part of the solah process or act: it refers specifically to the part where we put our forehead on the ground. So "ma" + "sujd" = masjid - the place where people worship together and put their heads to the ground in the act of worship.
Thus to answer my friend's question, "do I pray at the masjid often?" I guess I don't go to the masjid as often as I would like to.
"Do I pray at the musollah often?" The answer is yes, I do go there regularly.
Questions like this can be somewhat difficult to answer simply because the terms that non-Muslims use do not really fit the terms we Muslims use.
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