‘Public’ Prayer Rooms of Contemporary Bangkok

Abstract

This paper investigates the exclusivity of Muslim prayer rooms found distributed throughout urban Bangkok. Although the prayer room can hardly be considered domestic, its existence is not really ‘public’ either. Increasingly, this little worship space is accommodated in some public facilities owned by state organizations and private corporations. In this paper the prayer room is examined in three interrelated scales: the geographical network, the placement of the room within a facility and the interior. The examination reveals inscribed body-place relationships which are conceived specifically to different projected images of each place and different social categorizations of Muslim users.