On a Friday at Mid Valley, the question is always the same: where's the nearest place for Jumaat, and when do I need to leave? It doesn't have to be a full masjid; plenty of surau in the Klang Valley hold Jumaat too. But unless you already know, you end up walking further than you need to. JumaatFinder answers both questions at once.
What it does
- Counts down to this Friday's Zuhr, using JAKIM times for the zone your GPS puts you in.
- Lists masjid and surau within 3 km, sorted by distance, with walking time.
- Tells you when to leave for each one: walking time plus a buffer you choose, shown as On track, Leave now, or Too late on foot.
- Opens directions in Google Maps or Waze, and adds a weekly Friday reminder to your calendar.
- Works without GPS: pick Mid Valley, The Gardens, Bangsar South, KL Sentral or KLCC.
Official data, not guesses
OpenStreetMap knows where buildings are, but not which surau are approved for Jumaat. So I went to the source: the JAIS e-Masjid portal, which lists every official masjid in Selangor and the surau approved for Jumaat. I scraped both lists and geocoded every address, politely, one request per second.
That gave 452 official masjid (344 with their capacity) and 113 approved surau, 565 places in all. Not every address geocodes cleanly, so each pin records how it was found: the place itself, the street, or only the postcode. About half the masjid only matched to a postcode, which can cover several kilometres, so those don't get a walking time at all. A wrong "5 minutes away" is worse than no number.
Help from everyone, carefully
The people at the surau know things no dataset does, like "hall full by 1:05pm, overflow at car park L2". So anyone can mark whether a surau holds Jumaat, post a crowd report, or fix a pin that's in the wrong place.
- A surau shows as confirmed once more people say yes than no.
- A pin only moves once two people agree on where it should be.
- Crowd reports disappear after 35 days.
- Each person can send 20 reports an hour, and IP addresses are only kept as salted hashes.
What's next
Kuala Lumpur's list comes from a different authority (JAWI), so it isn't in yet, and the JAIS portal doesn't list every approved surau. Verified khutbah start times would be the next thing worth adding.
The code is on GitHub.