A mosque imam in Bandung was spat on by an Australian man who apparently took offense at the Quran recitation that he was playing through a speaker.
The incident occurred on Friday, April 28 at around 6am at Jami Al-Muhajir Mosque in Buahbatu, Bandung, and was captured by a CCTV camera installed in the mosque.
The video shows the Australian, identified by his initials MB, wearing a black top, a hat, and green pants as he entered the mosque and approached the pulpit. There, he saw M. Basri Anwar, the mosque’s imam, listening to a recorded Quran recitation.
MB then walked up to him and spat on his face. According to Basri, he ran away from MB as he screamed “fuck” and gestured as if he was going to punch him.
Basri said MB, who was staying at a hotel near the mosque, was annoyed by the Quran recitation.
“So it was Friday cleaning day, there was usually a Quran recitation, I think he felt disturbed,” Basri said.
MB was arrested at Jakarta’s Soekarno Hatta Airport on Saturday as he was about to board a flight back to his home country.
“He was not running away, he had a ticket for that day, and his visa expired on that day,” Bandung Police Chief Budi Sartono said at a press conference.
MB is now being questioned by the Bandung Police’s criminal investigation unit for alleged blasphemy towards Islam.
Mosque loudspeakers have long been a sensitive issue in Indonesia. A set of guidelines was first issued in 1978, which specified that mosque loudspeakers be used by experienced personnel to prevent the creation of disturbing mechanical static that would degrade the quality of the audio and possibly create ill will towards mosques. It also asked that those giving the call to prayer have melodious voices.
Despite numerous guidelines being reissued in the following years, Indonesian mosques still generally use their loudspeakers as they see fit.
In 2018, a North Sumatra woman named Meiliana was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2018 for complaining about the volume of mosque loudspeakers. After serving two-thirds of her sentence, she was released on parole in May 2019.
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