Prayer Call Idol

Ant checks out the comings and goings from our mosque.

Summer holidays have arrived and I have absolutely no news, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a good thing, given the events of this last year…

People are leaving for the summer or permanently (our English department achieving a fabulous 19% turnover in the process, although that could rise even further as people do a ‘runner’ over the summer and choose not to return. Oh! Temptation!), leaving behind excess alcohol, garage sale junk, cats demanding food and plants, water.

The cats are pretty happy, as far as I can see, having the run of the housing complex, (Nancy’s cat, Dora, has been hosting little cat get-togethers in her backyard), but I do have some concern for our compound mosque.

The bloody thing is located directly outside my bedroom window, and in summer the first Call to Prayer begins just after 3am. Yes, that is three o’clock in the morning.

When I first moved to Al Zuhoor II (the name of our housing compound means ‘The Flowers II’: a misnomer if ever there was one since the only flowers in it are in Nancy’s backyard, providing a backdrop to the aforementioned feline social activities), Prayer Calls were not a problem.

The Zuhoor II compound Mosque by day.

In Sharjah I lived within hearing distance of two mosques, and here, although there are three, they were a distant and quite beautiful background sound, like a choral work in parts. In some places you can hear even more mosques. If you stand on the hills above Fes in Morocco you hear the sound of 30 or more, extraordinarily beautiful, although apparently quietened in recent years due to tourist complaints. This is what happens when you base your tourist industry on the French, which is what Morocco has done. Madness!

Anyway, last July, Ant and I were awoken by what sounded like a bomb blast, which moved us from deep sleep to an upright position standing next to (or in Ant’s case, on top of) the bed, facing the window, in approximately one second. The compound had installed two loudspeakers on the roof of the mosque which were pointed directly at my windows. It was 3.04am and they’d cranked up the volume and let rip. To add insult to injury, they had dug up and deployed the worst Muezzin I have ever heard: “Allaaaaaaaaaah Akbar.”

You have no idea.

I should say, first, that I had not been in the habit of making judgements about Prayer Call quality, as if the Muezzin were contestants in some esoteric form of Arab Idol. But people do. “That guy is a goody, but the one on that road to Ajman really sucks” etc. I always felt unqualified to judge, especially since they’re not actually supposed to be singing – which is forbidden - but rather “saying with beautiful voice” as my Afghani taxi driver explained it. And since I sure as hell can't tell the difference...

In any case, bad is bad and this guy was a total shocker, and here he was sharing 35% Prayer Call load (there are 5 every day) with an ok guy and another with a voice from heaven. “It’s like listening to an adagio sung by three mosques when he's on,” my neighbour, who runs an Elizabethan madrigal group, commented.

And the volume. No one could sleep: Ear plugs and sleeping tablets didn’t work. My neighbour’s cats went bananas screaming around her flat. Other neighbours who’d lived in the region for over 15 years in various countries couldn’t believe what they were hearing. And since it’s the religion, and we are living in a predominantly Muslim complex, what were we to do? You saw what happened to the Danish cartoonist – and a teacher and her supervisor in the UAE were sacked when she showed those cartoons to a class. That’s an extreme example, but clearly you need to tip-toe around these issues.

The answer was that we lived with it for several months. I mentioned it to a bloke from Sydney who’s Muslim, and other people talked to whoever they knew, who then, I gather, talked to the Iman, and the Prayer Call volume went down for two of the Muezzin (no prizes for guessing which one still had the volume cranked up).

But even so it’s still really, really loud. At a lunch I held last week, the entire party stopped when the Prayer Call began – including people who live in Zuhoor II but further away from the mosque. I guess it’s a bit like living under the Sydney flight path. You get to a point where you stop talking when the plane goes over and restart afterwards without even realising that you’re doing it.

But things have improved, nevertheless. The really bad guy seemed to disappear for the most part, popping up only occasionally, suggesting that he only gets a gig when someone else is sick.

Which brings me back to my original concern. It’s summer. The country is closing down and people going home. Please god, the guy is due some leave, his vocal cords, some rest…

But no. Tonight when I leaned out my window to video-tape the last Call to Prayer of the day at 7.56pm, there he was. Think I’m exaggerating? Click on the video below. It took him a couple of minutes to get going but he was in fine form. Too pitiful even to warrant a Simon Cowell-like review, poor bugger. (Listen out, too, for the other 2 mosques which you can hear towards the end, when our guy stops to clear his throat.)



If you’re wondering about your own ability to make an aesthetic assessment, this site will tell you what time the prayers should be on any given day in your city, play you a Prayer Call accompanied by some photos of some famous mosques around the world, and then all you need to look out for is your own little ‘this way is Mecca’ compass and you’re set. Once you’ve learnt to wash properly, that is.

On a more serious note, you can listen to a BBC radio documentary on what the Call to Prayer is really about on Radio National for the next month or so by going to July 6th’s program here.

I don’t pray, but my thoughts are with you. See you soon in Oz.

Simone