A humble house of prayer, crowned with a tin roof shaped like a sliced pyramid. That’s the Masjid Batu Merah, a seemingly simple structure measuring a mere 10 by 15 square meters. Masjid Batu Merah wasn’t built by scholars, but by a wealthy man named Ibrahim Safari Hatala in 1575. Imagine the original Masjid Batu Merah, a thatched roof held up by wooden pillars. The floor was made of white sand brought from the shores of the Maluku Sea. The Hatala clan, who built the mosque, were originally migrants to the Maluku region, earning their living as fishermen.
In 1605, the village leadership passed to Hasan Hatala, another wealthy man who later took the title Pati Raja Hatala. He renovated Masjid Batu Merah, giving it a permanent structure and a tin roof. Islam spread rapidly through the Huamual region, including Luhu, and the number of followers swelled. The growing influence of Islam led to a second renovation of Masjid Batu Merah in 1805, commissioned by Raja Abdurrahman Hatala, a descendant of Ibrahim Safari Hatala. The mosque was becoming too small for its growing congregation.
By 1924, the limited space at Masjid Batu Merah prompted yet another renovation, this time under the rule of Raja Abdul Wahid Nurlete, a renowned scholar of the time. They carefully preserved the original form of the mosque. It was during this period that two prominent Islamic scholars, Hamka, the first chairman of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), and Bey Arifin, a respected scholar from East Java, studied at Masjid Batu Merah. The reasons why these two great scholars chose this particular mosque in pre-independence Indonesia remain a mystery. However, Professor Hamka never forgot his time at Masjid Batu Merah, returning to visit in 1939 and again in 1968.
While the Hatala clan didn’t always hold the reins of power, other families who intermarried with them, like the Nurlete clan, also contributed to the mosque’s legacy. Raja Ahmad Nurlete oversaw another renovation in 1973, completed in 1974, again maintaining the original structure. Finally, in 1988, Raja Latif Hatala replaced the surrounding wall with small cement pillars, adding a touch of elegance to Masjid Batu Merah. Despite its remote location, Masjid Batu Merah’s scholars possessed remarkable knowledge, drawing scholars like Buya Hamka and Bey Arifin to this village amidst the towering waves of the Maluku Sea.