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Mass Quran Reading in Malaysia to Mark Sacred Date

Muslim students read copies of the holy Quran to observe Nuzul al-Quran in a mosque in Bentong May 23, 2019. (AFP)
Muslim students read copies of the holy Quran to observe Nuzul al-Quran in a mosque in Bentong May 23, 2019. (AFP)
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Mass Quran Reading in Malaysia to Mark Sacred Date

Muslim students read copies of the holy Quran to observe Nuzul al-Quran in a mosque in Bentong May 23, 2019. (AFP)
Muslim students read copies of the holy Quran to observe Nuzul al-Quran in a mosque in Bentong May 23, 2019. (AFP)

Dressed in robes and chanting in Arabic, scores of Malaysian Muslim children read the Quran aloud in a mosque to mark a special date in the Islamic calendar.

About 80 people, mostly Islamic school students, gathered near the town of Bentong to observe Nuzul al-Quran, when Muslims believe the beginnings of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Mohammed.

The date falls during the holy month of Ramadan, when followers of Islam fast from dawn to dusk.

"The word 'Nuzul' means 'to come down'," said the students' teacher and principal Roslan Mohamad Esa as he led them in reciting on Wednesday.

"Our Prophet (Mohammed) received the Quran, Allah sent down the Quran... to the Earth."

Student Nurul Atikah Syazwani Risyadi added: "The day of Nuzul al-Quran is an important day where it shows that we are confident in the revelation of the Quran."

It is celebrated in Malaysia on the 17th day of Ramadan, the anniversary of a date in the seventh century when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mohammed in a cave near Makkah and started revealing the Quran to him.

Mohammed continued to have revelations over a period of more than 20 years.

Some sixty percent of Malaysia's 32 million population are Muslim, although the country also has significant Hindu, Buddhist and Christian communities.

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India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
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India Uses AI to Stop Stampedes at World's Biggest Gathering

As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP
As many as 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing. Niharika KULKARNI / AFP

Keen to improve India's abysmal crowd management record at large-scale religious events, organizers of the world's largest human gathering are using artificial intelligence to try to prevent stampedes.
Organizers predict up to 400 million pilgrims will visit the Kumbh Mela, a millennia-old sacred show of Hindu piety and ritual bathing that began Monday and runs for six weeks.
Deadly crowd crushes are a notorious feature of Indian religious festivals, and the Kumbh Mela, with its unfathomable throngs of devotees, has a grim track record of stampedes.
"We want everyone to go back home happily after having fulfilled their spiritual duties," Amit Kumar, a senior police officer heading tech operations in the festival, told AFP.
"AI is helping us avoid reaching that critical mass in sensitive places."
More than 400 people died after being trampled or drowned at the Kumbh Mela on a single day of the festival in 1954, one of the largest tolls in a crowd-related disaster globally.
Another 36 people were crushed to death in 2013, the last time the festival was staged in the northern city of Prayagraj.
But this time, authorities say the technology they have deployed will help them gather accurate estimates of crowd sizes, allowing them to be better prepared for potential trouble.
Police say they have installed around 300 cameras at the festival site and on roads leading to the sprawling encampment, mounted on poles and a fleet of overhead drones.
Not far from the spiritual center of the festival at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the network is overseen in a glass-panelled command and control room by a small army of police officers and technicians.
"We can look at the entire Kumbh Mela from here," said Kumar. "There are camera angles where we cannot even see complete bodies and we have to count using heads or torsos."
Kumar said the footage fed into an AI algorithm that gives its handlers an overall estimate of a crowd stretching for miles in every direction, cross-checked against data from railways and bus operators.
"We are using AI to track people flow, crowd density at various inlets, adding them up and then interpolating from there," he added.
The system sounds the alarm if sections of the crowd get so concentrated that they pose a safety threat.
'Makes us feel safe'
The Kumbh Mela is rooted in Hindu mythology, a battle between deities and demons for control of a pitcher containing the nectar of immortality.
Organizers say the scale of this year's festival is that of a temporary country -- with numbers expected to total around the combined populations of the United States and Canada.
Some six million devotees took a dip in the river on the first morning of the festival, according to official estimates.
With a congregation that size, Kumar said that some degree of crowd crush is inevitable.
"The personal bubble of an individual is quite big in the West," said Kumar, explaining how the critical threshold at which AI crowd control systems ring the alarm is higher than in other countries using similar crowd management systems.
"The standard there is three people per square foot," he added. "But we can afford to go several times higher than that."
Organizers have been eager to tout the technological advancements of this year's edition of the Kumbh Mela and their attendant benefits for visitors.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a devout Hindu monk whose government is responsible for organizing the festival, has described it as an event "at the confluence of faith and modernity".
"The fact that there are cameras and drones makes us feel safe," 28-year-old automotive engineer Harshit Joshi, one of the millions of visitors to arrive for the start of the festival, told AFP.