This mosque, one of Singapore's national treasures, was officially gazetted as a protected National Monument in 1979. However, what you see today is very different from the simple wooden builing that the early Indian Muslims of the area put up in 1859. The mosque is named after its founder, Shaik Abdul Gafoor Shaik Hyder, a South Indian lawyer's clerk, who felt that there was a dire need to replace the dilapidated Al Abrar mosque which then stood on the site. It primarily catered to the Indian Muslim migrants who settled in this vicinity, then known as Kampong Kapor (Limestone Village). The Abdul Gafoor Mosque in its present form was built in 1907.