There’s a mosque being built in every locality or so it seems. In the couple of square miles of neighborhood of where I’m at, I can count three mosques standing and one in the process of construction. And just about every mosque has large courtyards and ample parking space for the whole neighborhood.

The increase in the number of places of worship has however diluted attendance at the individual mosque, with worshippers barely making up half of the expanse within the structure. Rarely does the number spill out to the courtyard and beyond.

There has been a lot of concern lately over the idle hours of our youth. There are few avenues where these kids can positively use up all that pent-up energy. And since our municipalities have for some unexplained reason forsaken any concept of building neighborhood parks and venues for physical activity, I wonder if these massive and unused courtyards couldn’t be put to better use.

For example, why not allocate a portion of these courtyards and parking lots for basketball and volleyball courts? This would draw the neighborhood youth to congregate, exercise their bodies in a healthy and energizing manner, and when the call for prayers is announced, invigorate their souls. They don’t have to be reminded to attend prayers at mosques. They would already be there. It would also serve to breed familiarity and a sense of knowing your neighbor within the residents of the locality, a concept widely promoted by Islam to promote peace and harmony among residents.

My niece’s husband Majed came up with another novel idea. Mosques, he tells me, are generally easily recognized as direction points when explaining where you live. In a city where very few streets are named, let alone house numbers, the locality of a mosque and your living proximity to it would eventually draw your visitor to your house without great difficulty albeit after some time.

Now in an emergency, Majed adds, how are the paramedics expected to rush to your house to cater for the calamity unless you waste valuable minutes over the phone explaining in detail your whereabouts? Minutes that could mean the difference between life and death. Not everybody has the means to get somewhere fast. A housewife at home would be very vulnerable if her child or an elder suddenly needed medical attention, and her husband was at work.

So why not number these mosques within specified zones? Let the Fire Department and the Paramedics in on the distribution of these allocated zones within the city. Provide CPR and basic First Aid training to the live-in muezzin at the mosque to cater to the initial emergency until the paramedics arrived. This may be a stopgap measure but at least it would provide some effective comfort to the needy victim in those first few moments until the ambulance or professional help arrived. Families of the stricken would no longer fret those fleeting moments wondering when help was going to arrive and whether it would arrive at the right house and neighborhood.

Rather than being relegated to half empty places of worship, mosques would then truly play a bigger and more beneficial role in the activities of those it has been designed to serve.