Muslim devotees at Pothukallu village in Kerala's Malappuram district did not go to the Jamiyyathul Mujahideen Mosque – their regular place of worship – on Friday. Instead, they assembled under a tarpaulin-roofed makeshift structure a few kilometres away to offer Jumu'ah, the congregational prayers on Friday.
The mosque has been hogging national limelight ever since its administrators converted a portion of the prayer hall into a mortuary to facilitate the postmortem of people killed in the Kavalappara landslides. The arrangement has not affected the regular prayers at the mosque.
The administrators, however, decided to shift the Friday prayers to a public place to ensure uninterrupted autopsies.
"Friday prayers attract a large number of devotees," said K Abdul Kareem, the mosque's president. "We feared that presence of too many people inside the mosque would affect the autopsies. So we shifted the prayer venue," he said.
Sixty two people are believed to have died in the landslide that hit Kavalappara on August 8. The search teams have retrieved 37 bodies till Friday. Combing operation continues to locate 25 remaining people. The mosque lies four kilometres from Kavalappara.
Rich legacy of social service
Social service has been the hallmark of Jamiyyathul Mujahideen Mosque . It never discriminated against people on the basis of their religion. "We believe that all people are God's off-springs," said Kareem, while recounting a 19-year-old incident. "It happened after the mosque got a new coffin. The first body we carried on it was a Hindu woman," he said.
"Sharada, who lived on the other side of the river, died a week after we got the coffin. Her body was brought to Pothukallu from the Government Hospital in Nilambur. It was raining heavily. They hired a country boat to take the body home. But they needed a coffin with a lid," Kareem reminisced.
Sharada's family approached the mosque committee. The rest, as they say, is history. "The mosque committee always respected the dead," Kareem said.
He said the mosque donated one acre of land for free to the government to set up a Primary Health Centre in Pothukallu. "Now thousands of people are reaping the benefits of the health centre," he said.
Prayer hall to autopsy centre
The mosque was converted into an autopsy centre after bodies rescuers began to retrieve bodies from landslide-hit Kavalappara.
The district administration and the police officials were in a spot of bother when the first body was retreived. For, it was impractical to send the dismembered and mutilated body to Nilambur, which lies 45km away, and bring them back. So they approached the mosque committee with a request to set up a mortuary at its premises. "We gave our permission immediately," said Abdul Rahman, the president of the mosque committee.
"We converted the women's prayer hall into an autopsy centre on August 10. It will continue till the search operation concludes," he said.
The noble gesture came to light through a social media post by Parameswaran, an employee at the Government Medical College in Manjeri, also in Malappuram district. "The bodies of Mohammed, Chandran, Saraswati, Chacko and all are brought inside this mosque for autopsy. You won’t find a better example for humanism. The whole world should appreciate this," Parameswaran was heard saying in the video, which showed the prayer hall and the makeshift autopsy facility.
The mosque has won appreciation from many quarters, including Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. He termed it as 'a great example of Kerala's communal harmony and secularism.'
But the mosque administration remains nonchalant. "We have not done anything great. We just followed what Islam taught us. We understood the sufferings of the people and are helping them in their difficult time," said Kareem.