The story begins in 1414, when an Islamic missionary named Maulana Kiai Pati arrived from the coast of Nukuhaly on Seram Island. In Kampung Wawane, high in the mountains about six kilometers from the mosque's present location, he built a simple structure of sago frond walls and palm leaf roofing. From this base, Kiai Pati converted five villages - Essen, Wawane, Atetu, Nukuhaly, and Tehala. Fifty years later, in 1464, a second wave of Muslims arrived under Kyai Jamilu from the Sultanate of Jailolo on the island of Halmahera. Jamilu expanded the modest structure into a larger mosque and continued the work Kiai Pati had started. The mosque became the spiritual center of these mountain communities, a role it would carry forward even as the world around it changed dramatically.

When the Dutch arrived in the early seventeenth century and took control of Wawane, the mosque's congregation faced a choice. Imam Rijali, a descendant of Jamilu, chose to lead his people away rather than submit to colonial tension. In 1614, the villagers dismantled the mosque beam by beam, carried its pieces six kilometers east to the village of Tehala, and rebuilt it on a plain thick with wild mango trees. The new site gave the mosque its name: in the local Kaitetu language, 'wapa' means wild mango and 'uwe' means tree. Over time, a local legend emerged that the mosque had moved itself, walking magically through the mountains to its new home. The truth is arguably more extraordinary - an entire community chose to uproot its most sacred structure rather than leave it behind.

The mosque measures roughly ten by ten meters, with a porch of about forty square meters added during an 1895 renovation. Its construction follows the traditional Javanese mosque form: a multi-tiered pyramidal roof supported by four central pillars known as the saka guru, carved from kanjoli wood that grows along the coast of Tanah Hitu. No nails, no pegs - only ijuk fiber ropes bind the frame together, a technique that has endured since the fifteenth century. In the early eighteenth century, a wooden spire was mounted at the roof's apex, shaped to represent the Arabic letter alif, symbolizing Allah. The main door carries spearhead-shaped ornaments inscribed with calligraphy of God and Muhammad, alongside a turtle-shaped brass plate etched with a Salawat invocation. These details reveal a mosque where indigenous Moluccan craft and Islamic devotion are inseparable.

Inside the mosque - or rather, now in the heritage house of Abdurrachim Hatauwe, the twelfth descendant of the first imam - rest manuscripts that date the mosque's intellectual life with precision. The oldest is a handwritten Qur'anic mus'haf completed in 1550 by Imam Muhammad Arikulapessy, the mosque's first imam. A second mus'haf, finished in 1590, was the work of Nur Cahya, Arikulapessy's granddaughter and a student of the mosque's founder Kiai Pati. A Muslim calendar dated to the Gregorian year 1407 and a Friday prayer manuscript from 1661 round out the collection. The mosque also holds a poetry book about the life of Muhammad, still sung by villagers during the annual Mawlid celebration, along with oil lamps of wood and brass, wooden scales, and a beduk drum carved from lingua wood.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Wapauwe Mosque is who maintains it. Kaitetu village is home to both Muslim and Christian communities, and both share responsibility for the mosque's upkeep. When the roof thatch was replaced in the 1990s, the restoration involved two townships: Dusun Hila Kristen, a Christian-majority community, and Dusun Kalauli. The mosque was designated a Cultural Property of Indonesia in 1982, formalized with a plaque inaugurated by the head of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. In 1993, the 733rd Airborne Battalion contributed porches, pump wells, and garden ponds. The most recent restoration, in March 2008, replaced the roof thatch once more. Through colonial occupation, independence, and the sometimes violent sectarian tensions that have afflicted the Maluku region, the mosque has remained a shared inheritance - a place where the community's identity runs deeper than any single creed.