Jamiul Muslimin Mosque

IA Cham village on the west bank of the Hậu River in An Phú

To state matters clearly from the start, as this is often conflated in general accounts, this is a mosque of orthodox Sunni Islam belonging to the Cham Islam community of the southwestern Mekong Delta. It is not a Bàni mosque. The Cham community in this border region has practiced orthodox Sunni Islam from the outset, observing five daily prayers, fasting throughout the month of Ramadan, and keeping their mosque open every day of the year.

The name Jamiul Muslimin comes from Arabic, in which jami denotes a congregational masjid where the community gathers for the Friday midday prayer, and muslimin means the Muslim believers. Together, the name describes the exact role of the building as the assembly place of the entire local community. Community records sometimes abbreviate the name as Masjid Al Muslimin, while geographical survey papers transcribe it in separated syllables as Jamiul Mus Li Min. All three forms refer to this single mosque in Đồng Ky hamlet (also spelled Đồng Ki in press reports, and known in the Cham language as Kaoh Khi-a or Koh Kagia, meaning Hopea Tree Islet after the sao trees that once grew abundantly here).

One point of potential confusion regarding the name should be noted, namely that another well-known mosque in Ho Chi Minh City is also named Jamiul Muslimin, the mosque of the Cầu Kho Cham neighborhood on Trần Hưng Đạo Street, for which the library has a separate entry. The two mosques share a common Arabic name widely used across the Islamic world, but are two completely separate institutions.

IIFrom 1933 to the present building

The history of this mosque is the story of a single site rebuilt multiple times over nearly a century. What has remained constant across every reconstruction is not the physical building, but the ground it stands on and its orientation toward Mecca. In keeping with the standards of the Places section, the library records only the milestones belonging to construction history and religious life.

• 1933First mosque erected
  The Cham community in Đồng Ky village (known in Cham as Kaoh Khi-a, or Hopea Tree Islet) established their first congregational mosque on the strip of land along the Hậu River. This founding year is recorded in reports by Thanh Niên newspaper and Voice of Vietnam.
• 1984Rebuilt on the original site
  The community reconstructed the mosque on the original plot and used that building for more than twenty years. By the early 2000s, the structure had deteriorated and could no longer accommodate the growing congregation.
• April 7, 2008Groundbreaking of the present building
  Construction of the new mosque began on the same site on a much larger scale than previous structures.
• December 3, 2009Inaugurated on Raya Idil Adha
  The Representative Board of the Islamic Community of An Giang province held the inauguration ceremony coinciding with the Raya Idil Adha festival (1430 AH), completing the project at a total cost of 5.58 billion VND (rounded to 5.8 billion VND in some local accounts).
• During the 2008 to 2009 constructionDomestic and international funding
  Funding came from contributions by Muslim believers in Vietnam and abroad, together with a grant of 147,000 USD from the Red Crescent Authority of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
• 2019Community demographic figures
  The Cham Islam population in An Giang was recorded at over seventeen thousand people concentrated across nine commune-level units, including the Đồng Ky settlement.
• 2025Administrative boundary merger
  Following the 2025 administrative reorganization, Quốc Thái commune, Nhơn Hội commune, and part of Phước Hưng commune merged to form the new Nhơn Hội commune.

IIIThe lower hall, mezzanine, and mihrab

What distinguishes this building from most other village mosques in the delta is its two-level structure. Village mosques in the region typically consist of a single ground-floor hall. Here, the lower prayer hall serves men, while an integrated upper mezzanine level serves women as part of the primary structural design rather than a later addition. This layout greatly expands the building's capacity, allowing up to a thousand worshippers to attend services simultaneously while observing the religious separation of prayer spaces.

For visitors accustomed to Vietnamese communal houses and Buddhist temples, one structural contrast is immediately apparent, namely the absence of a multi-layered longitudinal axis. Traditional Vietnamese temples lead visitors through a triple gate, courtyard, front hall, and enclosed inner sanctuary that grows progressively more private and sacred. A mosque opens directly from the courtyard and ablution taps into a single wide room. No part of the room is more enclosed than another because there is no sacred object stored inside. The only spatial division here is between the standing areas for men and women, organized vertically by floor level rather than longitudinally by depth.

Interior decoration adheres strictly to Islamic doctrine, consisting solely of geometric patterns, stylized floral motifs, and calligraphic verses from scripture, without a single depiction of people or animals. To eyes accustomed to temples filled with statues and horizontal lacquered plaques, the prayer hall at first appears empty, yet that openness is intentional and forms the core architectural expression of the mosque.

IVThe lie of the land and orientation

An explicit qualification is needed at the start of this section. Islam does not teach feng shui. The orientation of a mosque is governed by a single mandatory rule of the faith, the qiblah direction pointing toward the Kaaba in Mecca along the shortest path across the globe. From this southwestern border region, that bearing falls slightly north of due west. The builders have no discretion to choose otherwise. No geomantic compass, no founder's birth year, and no astrological trigram play any role in selecting that alignment, and if a plot of land lies at an angle, worshippers align their prayer rows toward Mecca rather than shifting the qiblah.

The commentary below is a traditional Vietnamese geomantic reading offered by the library purely as a comparative reference for readers familiar with East Asian siting principles, not a teaching of Islam or a consideration of the local community when building the mosque.

VDaily, weekly, and annual observances

The liturgical rhythm of the mosque unfolds in three layers, consisting of five daily prayers, the Friday congregational prayer, and annual festivals calculated by the Hijri calendar, the lunar calendar of Islam. Because the Hijri year is roughly eleven days shorter than the solar year, Islamic observances move gradually across the seasons. In a riverside village like Đồng Ky, that means the fasting month of Ramadan falls in the middle of the dry season in some years and during the annual flood season in others.

Beyond ritual prayer, the mosque maintains two ongoing responsibilities standard to any masjid, namely Qur'anic instruction for children in the hamlet and charitable giving, which includes both the obligatory annual alms known as zakat and voluntary offerings known as sadaqah.

Daily life in the village closely follows religious norms, including halal dietary rules, abstention from alcohol, and modest dress with headscarves for women. Most families in the village make their living through brocade weaving, embroidery, livestock raising, and small trade around Đồng Ky market, with many households setting up their looms directly beneath their stilt houses. The large mosque standing in the center of the hamlet is therefore not a monument detached from everyday life, but the shared house into which the village pooled its savings and labor, and to which residents return five times every day.

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